


With a Voice of Honeyed Twilight

by Wanderbird



Series: The Music Pooled Beneath Them [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2020-11-27 17:38:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 64,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20952296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wanderbird/pseuds/Wanderbird
Summary: Cecil has made it back to Night Vale-- but he barely remembers it.Night Vale still exists-- but it is empty and war-torn.The resistance is still running-- but it has been driven from the town.But with the help of three Avengers and one Night Vale native turned SHIELD agent, this may be the best shot that Cecil, Tamika, and the rest of the Extended Book Club are going to get.The sequel!





	1. Returns are Surely Worse

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome new readers, and welcome back to the old!  
If you haven't read With Drops of Singing Static, I recommend you go back and read that first-- but you don't have to, I'm putting a recap in below. :)  
Happy reading!
> 
> No content warnings for this first chapter.

**Recap:**

The Avengers found a prisoner, locked deep in a HYDRA base. When they rescued him, he turned out to be blind, and have no memory of his past, or even his name-- and also be intermittently possessed by eldritch horrors so strange they would make Lovecraft jealous. They took him into their care anyway.  
John Doe healed.  
But the horrors were getting worse. And besides that, two suspiciously well-armed women from a little town in the desert wheedled their way into staying in Avengers tower, if under a close guard. Eventually, at the prisoner's request, Bruce staged a somewhat ill-advised medical intervention to try and get the eldritch monsters out of his head, and ended up making everything worse.  
The prisoner-- John Doe-- realized who he used to be (a certain radio host), and recognized the two women (ice cream sellers), remembered what happened to his town (Strex).

And decided to come back to help.

**(end recap)**

“Do not try to fight,” a dispassionate remark from Tamika’s lips. “We have the place surrounded.” Her head turned, slightly, though her gaze stayed where it was. “Cecil. ‘Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse’, Margaret Atwood, the Blind Assassin. I sincerely hope it will be good to have you back.”

What. The hell. Bruce’s hand clenched in his pocket, staring at the assembly before him. _This _was the Tamika Flynn that John and Coulson both seemed so enamored of? A kid. A little black fourteen-year-old with butterfly clips in her hair. Hell, _all _of these people looked to be minors, half of them no older than Tamika herself. But here they stood, armed with machine guns, rifles, axes, bows, swords, he even spotted a couple of medieval-looking maces in the crowd. Who gave a ten-year-old a machine gun? Were they even _legal _in New Mexico?  
And then John stepped forward, plucking the handcuffs from his wrists with improbable ease to clatter on the roof as he addressed the child, as if the restraints were made of nothing more than cotton candy. “My thoughts exactly.” He met her eyes briefly. “Well. Not _exactly, _but you get the point. First things first,” the supposed prisoner hesitated. “What happened to Carlos?”  
“Carlos Perfecto is fine,” Tamika stated. “He is also not here, and not _going _to be here until I am fully confident you are who you say you are.” Her voice softened by a touch. “He woke up just over two days after we returned him to Night Vale custody, and got over the overwhelming terror stage of the drugs about a week later. He is safely in one of our main camps.” The girl looked up, her gaze raking over the handful of Avengers sweltering in their armor—and Bruce, rather less sweltering in his purple button-up and corduroy. “Now,” she prompted. “Which of you are the interlopers, and which of you is simply not supposed to be here?”

What on Earth was she talking about? Also, Carlos _Perfecto, _Carlos the Perfect? Who the hell was that? Bruce frowned, but a sigh came from Coulson’s direction. “They’re the interlopers. I’m the unauthorized return resident.” A brief nod, with just a hint of a smile. “The name is Ag—is Phil Coulson, I left during Career Day to work with the shadowy world government organization. It was before your time, ah, Miss Flynn.”

“Don’t call me that,” the kid snapped, fingers twitching on the knife at her belt. “My name is Tamika. Or call me General, if you’d rather.” Her face relaxed a little. “In any case, you have two options, you can either leave or help with our resistance. If you choose the latter, know that it will be entirely under my command, and you _will _respect my organization, leaders, and decisions or be ousted from this town. Understand, Mr. Phil Coulson?”  
They couldn’t just follow the word of a pre-pubescent girl! What was even going on here, that a bunch of kids and teenagers _needed_ to mount an armed resistance force? And Carlos… was that the Carlos that John kept referring to, whenever he started to remember something? The… boyfriend? _Had _they been dating before the whole HYDRA-Strex entanglement?

Coulson smiled that reptilian smile of his. “Understood. I gather that Hannah and Lucy Gutierrez are messengers of yours—well, they informed me somewhat as to the goings-on here in Night Vale. I attempted to warn the interlopers that your word is law, and of the dangers of this town, but… I do not know to what extent they believed me. They are interlopers, after all.”

The kid—Tamika—squinted suspiciously for a moment, but relented soon enough. “That fact _is _pretty obvious, and they are not the only interlopers to arrive within the past few years. I will make sure they do not wander unattended into places they should not go, at least while they’re under my active command. You understand.”  
“Thank you. Night Vale is hardly a safe and gentle town, after all.”

  
Places they shouldn’t go? Could those words be any less informative? Bruce attempted to interject, “Why, exactly, are you—”

John’s hand was suddenly on his shoulder. With a beaming smile, the supposed prisoner turned to face him, and stared brightly into his eyes while he spoke, or at least in the general direction of his face. The blind mannerisms had gotten to be much less disconcerting, over time. “Dr. Banner,” John said. “As much as I admire your inquisitive mind, your only _slightly_ short of perfect hair, your fascinating voice, and so on, I must admit you really do seem to be a little slow on the uptake sometimes.” One eyebrow arched as he tilted his head, the very picture of earnestness. “I must agree with Agent Coulson on this point. You cannot mount a resistance on your own, not against Strex, not even with the rest of the Avengers which you have here. Tamika and her team are perfectly capable of raising and running a guerilla force against our corporate overlords and have been doing so for what was apparently over two years even in my absence, not that I ever had much of a hand in running it in the first place.” Did he not even realize these were _minors? _“You are in competent hands.” Tony and Nat both seemed to be keeping their objections to themselves, for the moment, if with an ear out for John’s quick and uncharacteristically self-assured words.

  
The ex-prisoner straightened to turn toward Tamika again. “Would you like my continued loyalty assured by blood oath or will a mere ritual sacrifice do?”

  
How could John _joke _about something like this?  
But it looked like Tamika was in on the joke, because she didn’t even smile. “I am not trusting the chances of my entire force on a simple blood oath, for love is the ultimate chain, the ultimate whip, and the ultimate slave driver; Sherry Thomas, the Burning Sky; and the whole world knows that you do not lack for love—but yeah. That would help.”

~~~

Before long, a couple of kids had leapt into the mini Quinjet and flown it away, supposedly to circle around until they came up with a way to disguise it and smuggle it in. Kids! Kids that claimed to have learned their piloting skills from Emily Dickinson novels, no less. And then they were off, jogging down the stairs of the abandoned building to squeeze into a pair of trucks tucked inside.  
Bruce frowned.  
The SHIELD building was coated in spiderwebs and dust, sand oozing through the cracks. How long had it even been abandoned? Did SHIELD not know? They had to know. They were supposed to get regular communications from every base, and this base hadn’t been in a state to send reports for years, by the looks of it.

“Hey scientist!” One of the kids in a scout uniform paused to glare back at him. “Get a move on!”  
Right. Bruce hoisted himself into the nearest truck, scooting up next to Natasha, one eye on her contemplative blankness. He supposed at this point he shouldn’t be surprised that the driver was barely tall enough to reach the pedals, all gangling limbs and eyes slightly too big for his face. Tony and Coulson, it looked like, ended up in the other truck with Tamika. That was fine. It wasn’t as if Bruce was helpless, and Natasha was an even tougher cookie (but these children weren’t a threat, were they?).

And perhaps an hour later, Bruce slid from the back seat of the truck into burning desert air. Finally, his eyes got the chance to adjust to this blazingly bright scenery and—  
“A _forest?!”  
_He could hear Tony’s incredulity from here. Even Natasha looked surprised, her brow furrowed.

Bruce let out a shaky breath. “A forest in the desert. Right.”  
And it was a temperate forest by the looks of it, too, with pines and oak and whatever those faintly purple leaves were from, not a jungle or anything that might reasonably be _found _in an area this hot. Bruce was by no means a botanist, but he did know _something _about plants, and this—this wasn’t—possible! _We never claimed to be possible…_ He shook his head.

“Yeah,” Tamika grunted. “I know.” She strode up calmly from the other van, limping faintly from the hip. Tony and Coulson were not far behind despite their gawking at the forest. _You have such lovely hair, _something murmured. “Dr. Perfecto said the same thing. And I admit, the only forests I’d seen before this showed up was the jungle in the Romance stacks of the Library.”

_A__nd your shirt, we just _adore _the color of your shirt. Isn’t it pretty? _The voice echoed in his head. Bruce tried to ignore it.

The children milled around, looking rather more on guard here than they had at the abandoned base, and within seconds a blonde girl in a ponytail managed to silently shepherd the others under the canopy. When Tamika turned to follow, she gave a series of brushes and taps against the leader’s arm, and then--  
“Ms—Tamika.” Coulson finally spoke up again, the same chilly smile on his lips. “Would you mind translating that, if it isn’t sensitive information? I’m afraid most school systems outside of Night Vale don’t teach Morse Code.”  
Tamika huffed and glanced back. “What kind of miserable excuse for a school system ignores the usefulness of non-verbal communication? Ugh. Just—get under the trees, and don’t listen to the voices.” _Oh, she’s just being cranky, _that high-pitched whisper replied. “The trucks may be disguised for now, but we need to get out of sight of the helicopters before they notice us.”

As Coulson dragged Tony beneath the trees and away from his scientific astonishment, Bruce went quietly, finally asking the obvious question.  
“What voices?”  
_Us! _

They stopped, then, just within the forest’s shade.  
“The voices of the Whispering Forest.” John interjected with a glare at the nearest tree. “I thought Strex was going to tear it down.” His arms crossed, scarred brown over the violet of that shirt.   
“Would you care to do the honors, Cecil?” Tamika’s voice was sharp enough to cut. “Remind me, what _do_ you know about the Forest?”

“What do I remember?” John’s fingers clenched briefly, shifting to rub at the eye implanted in his forehead. His voice was calm, casual. As if he were reporting some third-party anecdote, “The Whispering Forest appeared shortly after Poetry Week and right before Carlos’s one-year anniversary in our town. For those of you who hadn’t been following my broadcasts,” he amended, “this was around five or six months before Strex first showed its cowardly face here. The forest seemed absolutely friendly,” –_we _are_ friendly, what else would we be? _“if unexpected, but was blocked off by the police for quite some time.” John’s voice deepened somewhat, a touch of the hoarseness leaving it. “However, it was quickly discovered that anyone without reason to tear themselves away would quickly be lost in it, encased in bark and turned into a tree forevermore.”

_They are not lost, _the voice sounded almost reproachful now, _they are happy! We make them happy! We can make you happy too, Bruce, we would love to, we love you! _

“How do.” Bruce stammered. “How do they know my name?” Creepy, that was creepy. Wasn't it? Was it just him?

John’s two milky eyes snapped to the scientist’s face. “They know everyone’s name.”  
“They see into your soul,” Tamika’s gaze was on him too, cold and evaluating. “They see into your mind, it’s just what they do.”

_Trees! _The syllable dragged out too long, dreamy in its lofty tone. _They are us! _

“That’s why we’re staying on the edge of the woods for now.”  
So it wasn’t just a forest in a desert, Bruce thought, but a forest that… eats people. Assuming John wasn’t misremembering, and didn’t hallucinate the whole thing to begin with—but if he had, why would Tamika confirm it?

“The Whispering Forest is home to one of our strike bases, as of about a year and a half ago. Strex tried to raze the place, but everyone they sent either came back screaming in terror or didn’t come back because they had been, say, neatly beheaded, or were otherwise gone from this world.” The General gave a grim smile. “We have yet to figure out why. It does seem to like us, though, and anyone else who fights against Strex, so we took that as a sign. There are three rules in your time here: One,” the smile dropped, “Do not listen to the voices. The Forest has agreed not to hinder us on our missions, or try _too _hard to convince Book Club members and allies to join it while Strex is still a threat, but it fully believes what it’s doing is right, and it will still gladly accept new trees. Hence why we have rule number two: If you feel hopeless. If you feel depressed, or anxious, or anything else in such a way that you feel the problem might be solved if you could just get away from it all? You tell someone.” Her face was stony. “A human, a currently living, _ambulatory_ human, and you do not go anywhere in here on your own, no matter what. If it gets too bad, we will find someplace else to hide you. Somewhere you do not risk turning into a tree.”

_We don’t know why she hates the thought of us so much, _the trees added._ After all, we take only the willing, and they are always happy as part of us! _

“Three,” Tamika wet her lips before continuing, “and pretty self-explanatory, don’t cut anything off the trees.”  
What? Why not? But—OH. Bruce’s eyes widened. Oh. If the trees used to be humans, and the trees were sentient (and this whole train of thought was utterly absurd), then hurting the trees would be like—right.

“You may pick up fallen wood from the ground, but _do not damage the trees_, and no fires allowed. Now,” Tamika turned back to the children in the woods, some of whom had disappeared during her speech. “Did somebody go warn Maria we’re coming?”


	2. Back to Where You Started

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the Avengers are a little too busy digesting the hellish camping trip in front of them to notice the rest of the world around them. 
> 
> Content warnings: abstract descriptions of violence

The Forest was unusually free of underbrush.

Maybe it was the relative darkness here under the canopy, rendering the world in gentle grey-toned violet such that little sunlight actually reached the ground.

Or maybe it was just that nobody wanted to turn into a _bush_. Phil let his fingers linger on a tree trunk as he passed, following the children with a mind carefully blank in case of telepathic interference. From time to time, a scout would knock out a quick bit of code on a chunk of wood, presumably alerting the sentries to their presence. Surprisingly well-hidden sentries, at that, even for Night Vale. Phil frowned. Was it him? Or was it just that the war had wiped out anyone with less than perfect camouflage?

_All we want is for you to be happy, dear Phil. You’re so kind. Even if you don’t like to show it. _

Okay, could he _seriously _not block those voices out? Maybe he was rusty on his Boy Scout skills, but he should at least be able to ward a bunch of weird plants out of his mind!

_It isn’t your fault, you know_.

Phil snuck a glance at a massive willow as they passed, and was it just his imagination or did that great gnarl on its trunk look vaguely like a face? It was probably his fault, after all. It wasn’t as if he’d practiced his psionics much since SHIELD picked him up, except for whatever he needed on the spur of the moment. Which, to be fair, was probably more than just about any SHIELD employee that _wasn't _from Night Vale-- but the world was never built to be fair, and Night Vale even more so. _Shortsighted_, he thought. _and s__tupid of me. If we'd come here during the new moon, I'd probably be dead already, if I'm this out of practice.  
_

_No mortal we’ve seen can block us_ _out,_ the trees whispered._ Except for the ones we killed, of course. _

The ones they… “I thought what Tamika meant was that the _Book Club_ killed whoever was sent to cut you down.” The remark caught a few surprised glances, hushed though it was. Phil ignored them.

_Of course they didn’t! The poor things had barely even come to visit us by then. No, we dealt with the little emissaries themselves. _Why was it that the telepathic voice sounded almost… sad, now? 

“So… what?” the agent frowned. “Did you take them into, into yourself, or…?”

_Oh, no. The emissaries are very much dead. But don’t worry, _the trees gave a cool laugh, tucked in amidst the rustling of leaves. _They knew what they were getting into._

“We’re here.”  
Tamika needn’t have said as much. It was pretty obvious, after all, by the way the world shimmered in the corner of his eye, that this section of the Forest was obscured by some serious magic. Phil took a couple steps forward, and—

  
It wasn’t much.

A handful of lean-tos, tucked against the trees and embedded in the sandy dirt (forests didn’t grow out of sandy dirt, but the ground here looked just about the same as it did outside the woods). A collection of plastic sheeting dangled from the canopy, draped between limbs on the trees with standard-issue protection runes painted on the bottom. A somewhat more solid-looking shelter had at some point been built from cinderblocks and sheeting to contain what looked like weapons and ammunition. A couple of trees also sported ladders, or at least thick lengths of rope resting against their trunks, a large knot placed every foot or two along it.

“Strike Camp 2.” Tamika’s arms folded against her chest. “We move it around every so often, just in case, but it is definitely the most long-established camp we have. Disadvantages, Strex knows we often send attacks out of here. Advantages, they can’t touch us, and the Forest is big enough that knowing we spend time in here doesn’t tell them exactly where to intercept us. Disadvantage,” the grin faded a little, “it is definitely not a great place for the injured, and at least a third of our troops cannot safely stay here without turning into trees.”

“But it is much better hidden than the old hideout in Radon Canyon.” The next speaker was tall for her age, and heavily built, the muscles evident even under the olive jacket and the purple-grey girl scout vest she wore. Her voice was unusually deep, too. “I am Unholy Scout Maria, squad 23Ѫ, Night Vale Girl Scouts.” Maria’s smile may be grim, but it was decidedly less unsettling than Tamika’s. One booted foot scuffed the dirt beneath her. “Welcome. Interlopers.” Her eyes flickered from Coulson and his team, to Cecil, and back again. “And welcome back, Cecil.”

The blond girl with the ponytail sidled up again, one hand escorting a stubby boy with pale blue skin and an extra mouth set into his right cheek. When Tamika continued, her hands swept away from her chest to sign alongside her words. “Out of my three Commanders, Maria is the one you will likely be seeing the most of. Her seconds, Officers Annabelle and Liam here, lead squads 3A and 4B.”

The boy—Liam, apparently—nodded, while Annabelle gave a relaxed sort of salute.

“Maria, Officers,” Tamika handed over a piece of paper covered in scrawled writing, “keep in mind, all of them but Coulson and Cecil are interlopers. They don’t know shit about Night Vale, and the world they’re from is soft as hell—ask the scientists if you need to know how to explain something to them.” The paper changed hands, and Tamika went back to translating her speech into gestures as she spoke, the words hardly as fluid as Maria’s, but still decidedly competent. Her whole body seemed to move in rigid, energetic echo to the words. “And apparently the outside world has some weird hangup about nonverbal communication, I’m not sure if that includes sign language or not.”

“It does.” Phil licked his lips. His hands were much more hesitant than they should have been—he hadn’t realized just how few deaf people SHIELD employed. He’d barely even gotten to use the language there, and it had never been his best in the first place. He had always been better with Morse. “No sign languages are typically taught in schools out there. I can translate, but…”  
“That… looks like ASL.”  
Coulson jumped. How the hell had he managed to forget about Banner, Stark, and Romanov like that? That didn’t bode well for keeping them out of trouble. In any case, Agent Romanov stepped forward, and haltingly signed a few words.  
“It is. That’ll be good enough for now,” Annabelle shrugged, “and I’m sure someone can teach you more.” When Romanov silently asked another question, the girl rolled her eyes. “I’ve only been deaf for a few years, okay? Reading lips is hard. Besides, everybody around here can get by on Morse, even if they don’t want to take ASL as a language. I don’t even _know _why you freaks don’t want to teach people any nonverbal stuff, I mean I did understand that correctly, right?” a disbelieving giggle. “Because that just sounds stupid!”

Agent Romanov blinked. “No, you got that correctly. I do know Morse, I don’t know about the rest of us?”

Phil sighed. “I’m probably out of practice with that too, but yes. Banner and Stark here probably don’t—”

“Well excuse you,” Stark glared. “I have at least looked up the Morse alphabet a few times, it’s not completely unfamiliar to me.”  
Banner, at least, was a little more reasonable. “Yeah, I have no idea about Morse. I think I remember most of the ASL alphabet, though. I mean I know it’s clunky but at least it’s something?” He rubbed his shoulder for a moment. “Look, if there’s a library or something, I can—”  
Hahah no. “Absolutely not,” Phil burst out before he even finished translating Banner’s response for the others. “Do _not_ go to the Library unless you want your other guy to come out, Dr. Banner.” And wreck the place. And probably get caught by Strex, and what in the beams would they do if Strex got a hold of the Hulk? Or even if Dr. Banner simply got killed by librarians?

“… okay?”

Good enough.  
“If it helps, we do make regular trips to the Library, and you can put a book request in.” Maria put in.

~~~

Tamika left soon after, though not before having a hushed conference with Maria and the two officers. As it turned out, the rope thingamajigs Tony spotted hanging from some of the trees were ladders of some kind? With, at the top, a bunch of platforms hidden in the canopy, made from ramshackle combinations of yet more transparent plastic sheeting and fallen bits of vegetation. Liam assured him it would support an adult’s weight. Tony wasn’t so sure. But he took his armor off and climbed the rope (he would have trouble flying through tree branches anyway), and so far, while the whole structure did creak alarmingly, it seemed steady enough.  
Apparently the lean-tos on the ground were reserved for the injured, and anyone who couldn’t climb a tree. Otherwise, while the accommodations wouldn’t exactly be the most comfortable—a bunch of sleeping bags tucked precariously along tree limbs and in plastic hammocks—they were hard to see from outside, and “safe” among the trees.

Tony climbed back down and found a relatively private-looking spot on the edge of camp to talk, gathering the other three Avengers in a tight circle about it.  
A question. “What, exactly, are we getting into here?” He asked. At Coulson’s raised eyebrow, Tony elaborated. “With these, these kids. I mean I am all for getting back at whoever nabbed John, and made those two ladies feel like they had to torch their own house just to escape, but—Coulson, these are children! And this camp is serious, their weapons are serious, and I have _no idea _what is going on.”

Bruce cleared his throat. “I don’t even know what you mean about the two women. Is that… Helen and Laurel, or whatever their names were? Look, I only came because Fury told me to, I don’t even know what the job is, since there’s no SHIELD branch here to investigate after all, and that was all the briefing said.”

“Seconded.” Nat licked her lips before continuing. “Phil, all I got was Fury’s briefing. What are we here for?”

Agent Coulson heaved an enormous sigh. He glanced up at the yawning void of a sky, still managing to peek the occasional twinkling light through the canopy, as familiar as his own fingerprints to the former Scout. It was good to see it again, even if the vastness of it all made his liver squirm. “You have a point. I suppose I should be honest.” He hesitated, but finally dragged his eyes back to the conversation at hand. “This is where I’m from.” A faint smile traced his lips, achingly sincere. “I loved this town, when I still lived here. I had to leave, my family was pretty deeply involved in the Blood-Space War and around when I turned fifteen they started dropping like flies, so I took a job with SHIELD when Career Day came around. You’re not supposed to ever come back.”  
  
_… okay one_, Tony thought, _he has to have been lying somewhere in there, Coulson isnever this honest. And two—_  
“The Blood-Space War?” Banner interrupted.  
“Unimportant, for now.” The smile dropped. “The point is, for those of you who have been out of the loop, John, whose original name is Cecil, is also from here. He was working with a rebel group, with _this _rebel group, and Strexcorp—the group attempting a corporate takeover of the town—kidnapped him. At some point he got passed off to HYDRA, and that was where we found him.” Coulson’s face stayed carefully impassive as he kept talking. “I think you’ve all heard of Strex at this point. Economically, at least, they dominate Night Vale and the neighboring town of Desert Bluffs. Politically speaking, any remaining government that has yet to flee or die is barely even their puppet at this point. From what I recall from Cecil’s broadcasts before he was captured, it started with Strex sending its helicopters over the town and dropping pamphlets everywhere. They did something to Old Woman Josie—a very nice old lady with some very tall and powerful friends which nobody else in town really has contact with—” that was remarkably vague, “and when Cecil started to come to the conclusion that they may be a major danger, Strex bought the radio station where he worked.”

Coulson made a face. “Cecil has been the most important news source in Night Vale since before I was born, so that was tantamount to buying up the entire flow of information into the town. Strex then proceeded to gradually purchase almost every company in town including the police department, though Hannah and Lucy’s—Helen and Laurel, to you—ice cream shop was a notable exception.  
“Tamika pretty quickly became one of the main dissenters beside Cecil, who had to keep his mouth mostly shut to avoid punishment by the new management. She was certainly the most open dissenter, except for maybe Steve Carlsberg. When Strex got really out of hand, she took that to outright protests. They began trying to apprehend her, and she and the beginnings of the Book Club—the group we’re staying with now—fled, and began hiding out in the desert. Eventually Strex started what I guess was a massive prison camp for everyone in town. Well,” Coulson’s lips quirked up into a smirk, “assuming I read Cecil’s subtext right.  
“They tried to bulldoze the Whispering Forest to suppress resistance, but more importantly they took the opportunity to kidnap Cecil’s boyfriend when the Book Club showed up at the prison camp. Cecil ran out to save him, Tamika sent a last-minute strike team to help, and they managed to get the boyfriend out—but Cecil was captured along with several members of the strike team. The survivors fled, and from that point on the radio broadcasts in Night Vale were taken over by Kevin, from Desert Bluffs, and fully controlled by Strex.” Coulson let out a breath. “I’ve hardly had contact with the town in years. That’s about all I know.”

  
There was a lull for a moment as everyone digested the information. Finally, Nat asked a question. “Kidnappings, sure, but since when does corporate greed warrant _armed resistance_?”

The voice that answered was young but solemn—Maria.  
“Ever since corporate greed includes drugging the municipal water supply, taking total control of the local government, paying workers primarily in company credit, microchipping employees, and surgically ‘fixing’ any who differ from their model soldiers whether the person in question wants it or not.” She stood aggressively, her legs shoulder width apart and arms crossed in front of her chest. The girl’s eyes passed from person to person, unable to disguise their nervousness. “Tamika says we can probably trust you, and either way it won’t change much if I give you the basics. Besides, all five of you need to be caught up on the legal changes since any of you were last here. Cecil!”

John left off his conversation and came to join them. “Maria?”

“Make yourselves comfortable,” she said. “This will take a while.” 


	3. A State Can Be No Better

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter! :D  
As usual, specific cws are in the end notes
> 
> Chapter CWs: mild eldritch horror

How Coulson merely sighed when Maria claimed that gluten was prohibited, Bruce had no idea, even if it was technically ‘wheat and wheat by-products’. Possessed by evil spirits? How backwater _was _this town? Even more baffling, how was this a _recent development?!_ And for once he was definitely not alone in his incredulous reactions. Tony, for one, interrupted several times to ask for clarification—

“What do you mean, pens are forbidden?”  
This, at least, Maria seemed less confused by than some of the other objections. “All pens and other writing utensils are banned within city limits,” came her deadpan response. This had to be a joke.  
“You’re kidding,” Tony mirrored Bruce’s thoughts exactly, disbelief in the very set of his shoulders as he sprawled on the ground before Maria. “What the hell kind of danger do you people see in _pens?”_

“She is not.” John finally spoke up.  
“Writing utensils, just like bar code scanners, pocket calculators, and margarita glasses, were banned a long time ago, entirely for our protection, of course.” The addendum came smoothly to John’s voice. Bruce shivered. “Though in the City Council’s absence, the ban on bar code scanners has been lifted for Strex employees of non-Night Vale origin, since they could not get the Sheriff to recognize their technology for scanning the barcodes they lay on employees as being any different. I _suppose_ it may have been in part to slow me down,” he mused. “not that no longer being allowed to handwrite did _much_ on that front, even if it is a lot harder to write in braille with a cocktail straw than it is with a pencil. But then,” John gave an uncomfortable frown, as if he wasn’t quite sure where the words were coming from, “knowing what goes on in this sleepy little town is my job. The police will always have difficulty stopping me from doing so.” 

Barcodes on employees? That had to be ID cards or something, right? Not literally the employees themselves. Then again, Bruce worried, it would be just like this town to actually tattoo bar codes on people, from what he was hearing.  
“…Right,” he muttered.

“And this police force you mentioned,” Natasha interjected from where she leaned on a tree. “The Sheriff’s Secret Police? They’re the ones who enforce all this bullcrap? Who’s the Sheriff?”  
“_The Secret Police are here for our protection.” _John had jerked upright, muscles straining as he spoke. It was unsettling in the extreme to hear his voice so flat, instead of sonorous and changing. This, this was like a robot had just stepped in and spoken through his mouth, taking control of John like a half-trained puppeteer.

A sigh from Maria. “Don’t just _mention_ things like that all the time, not out loud.” She clapped her hands, right up by his face. “Cecil,” she snapped. “John. Whatever you want to be called, snap out of it.”

No response.

“Ugh,” Maria grumbled. “He’s not half as bad as Carlsberg, but you’d still think Cecil would have learned by now what _not _to bring up on the radio. Just… give him a couple seconds, and he should be fine. At least he didn’t offend too much under Strex, cause they’ve been one hell of a lot worse with enforcing it all.”

Sure enough, a few seconds later, John blinked dazedly, and… “What were you saying? I’m sorry,” he frowned, “I must have zoned out a little.”  
What.  
“Are you sure you’re okay, John?” Bruce asked, taking care to keep his voice mild and polite. So some part of the… enforcement method, he supposed, involved… what the hell was he even supposed to call this? Hypnotism? Brainwashing? And by the sound of it, the crime had to have been something around broadcasting displeasure with the police. The ‘secret’ police. For that to be a crime… “Natasha mentioned… something,” he was never very good at subtlety. “and you acted like you’d been hypnotized or… well.”

“Oh!” John’s face relaxed. “That. Yes, it always does affect me more when I’m not broadcasting. I think it has something to do with that whole ‘Voice of Night Vale’ thing.” He grinned. “Maria, have there been any other changes since the Company Picnic?”  
The kid shook her head. “Not a whole lot. The Picnic itself has mostly disbanded, but they ended up shipping everyone under eighteen to this Strex-brand boarding school in Desert Bluffs. Tamika and I checked up on it. It’s a prison but it won’t kill them, or even brainwash them too badly as long as we get them out at _some_ point. That also got us quite a few extra forces for the rebellion, since plenty of kids who weren’t quite brave enough before were willing to join us if it meant escaping the prison camp. Unfortunately, if anyone who _isn’t _a definite rebel sympathizer sees minors in Night Vale, that means they’ll probably report us.” A pause. “Strex also tried to ban weapons, though that obviously didn’t work out for _anybody _involved, so it got rescinded by the end of the week. As you know,” she continued, “Bloodstones were outlawed right before you left, partly to hamper our communications. We kind of managed to get around that? We buried some circles throughout the town, and the Faceless Old Woman is hiding some personal circles in a few of the houses. You’ll presumably be a big help there, what with being able to warn of raids. Oh yeah! Most recently, it was… shoes? Shoes.”

“Shoes are outlawed?” Bruce said in a strained voice. Why the hell would anyone outlaw _shoes? _

“Except for non-Night Vale Strex employees and those with special dispensation, yeah. I guess to try and keep people from smuggling other forbidden items around in their shoes.” Maria shrugged. “possibly also to make it easier to spot rebels, since we’re hardly going to walk across miles of desert barefoot, or even on the pavement since it’s so hot most of the time. And they banned Library access, of course, and tried to demolish the building.”  
“_Tried_ to demolish it?” Natasha pressed.

“Well, technically I guess they succeeded,” the girl admitted, “just not for very long. We already burn the Library down every few months to keep the librarian population in check. I mean,” a sheepish glance, “I don’t know about in the big city, but librarian traps are expensive out here, especially given how few suppliers are willing to ship this far out in the desert. So it wasn’t surprising to anyone but Strex when it popped right back up on the same spot as the Strex-brand bookstore they set up a couple days later, as good as new. And everybody who actually _goes_ to the Library already has to be careful if they don’t want to fall victim to librarians in any case, so it’s not like having to also hide your entrance and escape is much harder. Anyway—”  
Maria was cut off by something bright, and black, and blinding—

“Commander Maria.” Something spoke in the buzzing of a thousand bees. Its voice was like—it was like the static that surrounded John, when he’d first woke up from surgery.

Bruce’s sight finally began to clear. There were tears on his face, his eyes were watering, his head ached. He tried not to look at the… thing. Whatever it was, that was speaking. That seemed to help. Everyone else looked to have had a similar reaction to him, though Maria had turned to squint at the being, one hand shading her gaze.

Well. Everyone except John, whose blind stare was fixed on the being. He probably couldn’t even tell how bright it was.

The… angel?  
_No_, Bruce bit his lip, _angels are, angels don’t exist_. And also weren’t allowed to exist, even if they did? But this being certainly _looked _like an angel, if angels were eight feet tall, with massive feathered wings that seemed to twitch in and out of existence. There was something weird about that ridiculous size, something that took a moment for Bruce to place: the angel, if an angel it was, wasn’t built to accommodate its height. It was like someone took the original wrinkled frame, copied it into a word document and stretched it up by a good four feet, then slapped a few pairs of wings on. Also, he finally noticed as the light began to fade, it only had the one eye, that floated above its head in the center of an odd sort of circular protrusion that looked like it was made of some kind of stone. _Not a halo, _Bruce tried to insist. _It definitely isn’t a halo, see? It’s sideways!_ _So… maybe an angel? _His thoughts started to wander._ Or, you know, another alien. Hah. Wouldn’t that be funny, if Strex was just a bunch of aliens? _

_You really are handling this well, Dr. Banner, _the trees cooed from so far away, the bark unmoving beneath his hand. _Lots of people just fall right over the first few times they see one. _

He had to stifle a giggle. _Aliens, angels, sentient trees; hell if he ever did meet angels it would probably technically be an alien, Thor probably had some stashed away somewhere. Heheheh. Stashed away. Like a, like a flower or something dried in a cave. Gee,_ Bruce really couldn’t help the grin spreading across his face, _and that ringing felt really nice for some reason._ Didn’t it hurt, normally? Or could he just not normally hear it? Maybe both! He… he… what was he thinking again?

“Dr. Banner.”

Was he crying? Bruce wasn’t sure. Mostly he just felt light, light, or rather dark, dark, but soft as a, as a piece of ribbon on the breeze. A leaf on the wind?

“Dr. Banner,” the voice intruded again, red wine and velvet and deep, dark death. “Erika can be very overwhelming, but I need you to focus.”  
What was it about that voice? He could get lost in it, in fact he _was_ lost in it, but he didn’t feel lost. It felt more like an anchor, wrapped around his ribs to pull him back.

“You’ll want to be around for this part,” the familiar voice rasped. “I promise.”  
He didn’t know what was happening, but a moment later Bruce snapped back into the present with an almost audible click. The feeling of bark on his fingertips, of hot air made slightly cooler by the shade, it all felt new and unfamiliar, as if he hadn’t been there all along. God. What happened?  
“Don’t look too hard at Erika,” the voice soothed. “They aren’t very good at the whole ‘reining in their newfound and incomprehensible power’ part just yet.”

…John?  
Bruce forced his eyes to focus, and the world eased out of its former blur. That didn’t sound like the hoarse, croaking voice he was used to from John, but there the man stood, one hand clasped in his own, peering intently into him with those clouded eyes.  
When John felt the scientist’s hand twitch, he flashed a shy sort of smile.  
“Mr. Stark passed out, unfortunately. I’m told the Erikas do often have that effect?”  
Shouldn’t John be sure of that, if he remembered everything as he appeared to?

“And Natasha?” Bruce managed to croak.  
“I don’t know what you guys are having so much trouble with,” she remarked from the left. “It was bright, and loud, and that’s it.” Before long a hand was on his shoulder, smaller than John’s—so that must be Nat.  
“Anyway. Erika,” Natasha prompted, “you were saying?”

The being opened its mouth, revealing sharp and battered teeth and a tongue so long it would make a chameleon jealous. “ t r u s t,” came the word, a half a second behind the motions of its lips. “ tell Tamika to trust the interlopers, for they come in aid.”

“We already knew that!”  
How could the kid, how could Maria sound so aggrieved with the being? Bruce could barely even _look _at it without getting dizzy!  
“ but you do not act on it,” the angel continued. “ Strex will know they have arrived, for It can feel the passenger in the Voice. There is no time to spare on testing the interlopers for their trustworthiness and competence. If captured, Strex will use their lives to collect the Voice again, for they have not been protected from such use.” John’s hand tightened on his, unsurprisingly. Bruce was pretty sure the poor man would rather die than go back to Strex and HYDRA’s tender ministrations.

Maria cut in. “How? We’re safe enough here, they can’t send any yellow goons into these woods and expect them to come out alive, and they can’t destroy the place either.”

“ B e c a u s e.” the angel’s neck tilted to one side, long and veined and eerie in its movements. “ they do not need to enter in order to find the Voice, or drive the Voice into their keeping.” Beside him, John’s shoulders hunched just slightly more. His fingernails left gouges in Bruce’s skin, but he could hardly ask the man to stop. Not now.  
“ all that protects the Voice is the fact that the mayor binds all souls in Night Vale every year to her, and the Smiling God all souls in Desert Bluffs to Itself, and that our—or _the _town, rather—will not let them bring another person in. Now there are others, i n t e r l o p e r s,”

“and all it takes is one soul captured before they can simply rip me from my body.” A whisper, trembling in the air.

The angel turned its eyeless face slowly to John, again, and the scientist beside him. Bruce desperately tried to avert his eyes against the flood of nausea trickling from his gut at the sight.

“ before it can summon Station Management, actually. The, uh, the real Station Management, the ones you’re carrying.” Why did the angel suddenly sound so… casual? “Or at least that’s what—uhm. Sorry.”  
“No, no, it’s alright, uh, intern… Vithya?” John managed a weak smile.

“Erika, please.” The angel smiled sheepishly. “Jo—the other angels insist. It’s good to see you back, though, and in one piece as well! I’m sorry, I’m supposed to talk all doom and gloomy, I’m just not very good at it yet without a script. Kinda new to the whole job.”  
“It’s good to see you too, and you are still a good bit more alive than most of my former interns.” John seemed to have calmed down a bit, though his grip was still painfully tight on Bruce’s wrist. “I hope your time with me prepared you well, at least for all the public speaking.”

“… Cecil, I was only your intern for a week.”  
“Is that— no. Sorry. Yes. I remember.” He clearly didn’t.  
“You reported on me. Twice.”  
“I said I remember!” John was tense again, all his former relaxation fled. “I definitely remember you, I mean I-I recognized you, didn’t I?” His voice had long slid back into its usual hoarseness, though judging by the look on Vithya’s face (if Bruce was reading the immortal, largely faceless being correctly), this didn’t used to be his normal. “I’m sorry,” came a half-plea, half-whimper. “Beams, Vithya, I’m sorry.”  
That… definitely didn’t sound like the confident and terrifying John responsible for whatever happened on the Quinjet on their way in. Bruce wouldn’t even be sure that anyone besides him heard, if it weren’t for the uncomfortable manner that Coulson kept his eyes fixed in the distance, and Maria’s pensive stare.

At long last, the angel broke the silence. “…it’s okay. Cecil. I don’t mind. I mean I’m not really supposed to be Vithya any more in the first place, it shouldn’t matter to me if you—remember who I used to be or not.” It cleared its throat. “Um, anyways. I was supposed to warn you about that, Commander. Strex, I mean. If the outsiders leave the Forest, you need to be _sure _they won’t be captured. And we’re telling Tamika and the others, of course, but we sent someone a little more experienced to go tell Central, since they have way better wards than you do up here. No offense. Strex know Cecil’s in city limits, and if they can get their hands on any interlopers, Cecil’s gonna be toast. Just don’t get rid of the outsiders completely, because apparently you’re gonna need them? Later? Yeah.”  
The angel shifted awkwardly to one side, with all the poise and inevitability of a skyscraper. “I guess I’ll… go now.” Wings shuffled behind its back. “Uhm. Thanks?”

And with another blinding flash, the being spread its wings and disappeared, leaving naught but blurry vision and a ringing in the scientist’s ears as proof that it had ever been.

~~~

Far away and years ago, in a desert much like Night Vale, a young woman walked.

She was not hungry, nor thirsty, nor much of anything else, beyond so _tired_ her very bones trembled with every step she took. But she was alone, and she was alive.

The young woman kept walking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Specific CWs: mild eldritch horror, trippy mind control-ish reactions?


	4. It Has Its Right to Weep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to finally see Carlos! 
> 
> No content warnings needed this chapter :)

Carlos was still in the lab when he got the news.

Cecil was. Cecil was back?   
Clammy hands gripped the doorframe beside him, and Carlos did his best to focus on the feeling, anchor himself in his body. Two long, thin indentations lining the edge of the frame, cool stone, basalt according to his tests, glassy and smooth where time and all-pervasive dust had worn it smooth. A breath flooded into his lungs and sent Carlos swimming into giddy nausea.

Cecil was _alive. _

He couldn’t keep the grin off his face—but then again, he wasn’t exactly trying.   
“He’s alive!” One hand slipped free of the doorframe to tense into a fist and release, flapping through the air in his excitement. “And you have him?” Carlos’s voice was bursting with excitement, worry—oh stars, Cecil was alive! “He’s safe, right? Tell me he’s safe.”

“Of course we have him.” Janice’s beaming face gazed up at him. “He’s in the Whispering Forest camp, surrounded by friendly trees and under Maria’s command.”  
“How is he?”   
At that Janice seemed to hesitate, running her hands briefly along the wheels of her chair. She had an electric one too of course, being Steve’s kid, but it had gotten wrecked when Strex took Base Camp 8 a month or so ago and she had yet to come up with all the parts for a new one. “Walking. Talking. As far as I know, he seems to be in full possession of his mind and memories, or at least no worse than normal. Tamika doesn’t actually want me getting too involved with Uncle Cecil until she’s sure, but when I scried for him earlier today he seemed fine. Lots of new scars. But he seems to be more or less okay now? His voice is different, though, it’s all hoarse and monotone most of the time, that part’s just _weird_.”

“But he seemed fine?” Carlos bit his lip.  
If Tamika wasn’t sharing with him or Janice, she must be trying to keep anyone that had been too close to Cecil from getting attached again, which meant she wasn’t sure herself. Logical enough, he supposed, a couple of scrying sessions beforehand certainly wouldn’t be en—wait.  
“Scrying?”  
His stomach sank with dread. Or was it confusion, maybe? Both, Carlos guessed, or dread _brought on_ _by_ confusion. “Normally, trying to scry on Cecil just shows static, right? I thought, I thought that wasn’t just me, I mean I know I still only scry at a second-grade level, but I thought everyone had trouble trying to watch Cecil.”

A blink.   
“You’re right. Everyone gets static on Cecil, usually. Not even the Eternal Scouts have managed it.” Janice frowned. “But he showed up in the visions that let us know he was coming back, and he showed up when I looked earlier…”

Carlos swallowed his nervousness. “So Tamika might have a point.”

“Of course she might.” The kid winced, fingers clenching on her armrest. She had to be even more torn up about this, I mean Cecil was her uncle, after all. “Tamika usually does, and she knows she won’t have nearly so many emotional complications about the whole situation as… as the rest of us.” Janice took a deep breath before continuing, her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. “I should make sure she realizes the whole scrying thing, thanks for pointing that out. Though of course, that means I might have to let her know I told you what was going on—which by the way, you have no idea about, got it? Unless she already knows I told you, you have no idea Cecil was even found.”

“Understood.”   
Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just that Station Management had gotten knocked around a little, or, or something equally inoffensive. Unimportant? He supposed that would be important, though, Station Management was pretty vital to Cecil’s job, it just wasn’t important to _him_. Or was it? Would Cecil even be the same person without those things looking over his shoulder every day? Carlos shook his head, batting the thoughts from his skull. “Thanks, Janice. I’m glad you told me, at least. Even if I can’t really let on until Tamika gives the okay,” he managed a tight smile.

“I didn’t want to leave you hanging.”   
A chilly little hand reached out to squeeze Carlos’s before Janice backed her wheelchair up to the next doorway and turned it around in a neat three-point turn.

Carlos hadn’t become a surrogate uncle, exactly, in Cecil’s absence, but he and Janice had certainly gotten closer. She couldn’t talk to Steve much, since the man was always busy working with the PTA, or organizing supply imports to the rebels from the outside world. And speaking of Steve Carlsberg, Carlos had to grant his boyfriend a win on this point: Steve was an excellent, upright and amazingly courageous person, but a _terrible_ father when push came to shove. He barely even saw his daughter once a month! And even that regularly had to be cancelled or postponed when Strex tailed him a little too near, or kept too close an eye on the meeting place. And Old Woman Josie was gone, and Cecil had never gotten very close to his interns except for maybe Dana, but they hadn’t had any contact from her since Cecil was captured. Earl Harlan was still undercover in town, _somehow, _and Janice had never known him particularly well in the first place, so really the only person left who knew Cecil very well and that Janice could actually contact on a regular basis was… him. Cecil had always had plenty of casual friends, obviously, but never… Nobody close, beyond the five of them.

Janice had also taken to spending a lot of time with Tamika, but Tamika had never seemed to be great with that sort of personal emotional attachment.   
So Janice talked to Carlos.

He welcomed the company, and Janice was always ready to learn, even if she was more of a mechanic than a physicist or a chemist. Maybe if everything worked out alright, he’d be able to keep taking care of Janice, someplace a little less dangerous than the middle of a war zone. Even if Cecil _wasn’t_ the person he used to be.

When Carlos turned back to his experiments, it was with a lighter heart.

~~~

Maria sighed, and stood up from their bloodstone circle under the trees.

That was one thing she didn’t like about Strike Camp 2, or any of the Strike Camps, really: They may get a lot more action than the Base camps, but there wasn’t shit in the way of privacy. Which in this case meant the interlopers had spent her entire call with Central gawking, smirking, and generally making her want to squirm beneath their stares instead of focusing on maintaining her astral projection. Apparently they’d never seen anyone astral project before? Somebody should really complain to their schools.

Maria brushed the dirt from the legs of her scouting uniform with an absent flick of the hand. She may as well take her time, regain her composure a little before addressing the interlopers.

Change of plans,” she spoke at last. “Tomorrow morning, before sunrise, Cecil gets an escort to Central, that’s Base Camp 12.” When Cecil’s milky eyes snapped open, Maria elaborated. “I know you’ve only been here a few hours, but Tamika wants to get you under better wards as soon as possible. Just in case Strex does get a hold of another interloper from somewhere.”   
“Because a few extra wards from the Book Club will definitely protect me from the will of a Smiling God if it comes down to it.” Cecil hunched back against the tree, hugging his knees to his chest. “If you didn’t need me so much, if Carlos weren’t still here, if I thought you’d be able to drive them out alone, maybe I could just let the Forest take me instead. They can probably protect me better than you people can.”

Silence.

“DON’T YOU DARE.” Maria could have teleported, she stood in front of him so quickly. 

Cecil jumped visibly when her hand latched onto his bicep and hauled him upright, away from the tree that seemed to stretch toward him as he left. The girl was only an inch or so shorter than he was, and rage made her seem even bigger. “Don’t you _dare_ join them,” came a whisper.

Those were a lot of ifs, yes, but…   
Maria blinked in quick succession, desperately trying to keep the tears from her eyes. “We’ve lost so much, _you’ve _lost so much, you can’t just give up now!” For so much of the Book Club, Cecil’s return was, was the return of hope. A shot at victory. To hell with appearances, if their newly resurrected symbol of hope gave himself to the Forest, that would probably be the end of it! At least for all but Tamika’s core group, but what kind of chance would they have with just the couple dozen of them? What could they even do against that kind of odds? What would _Maria _do?

That gaze was colder than the Cecil she knew, and it wandered unfocused to the left of her head when he replied.   
“It was a passing thought.” His voice was calm. Even. “But if my choices are the Whispering Forest or Strex, I would give anything to join the Forest if it meant not falling back into Strexcorp’s custody.”

_You could join us as well, Maria,_ the Forest murmured,_ and you would all be safe._

Safe.   
Sure. She would be safe, and everyone under Strexcorp’s filthy thumb would stay there.

_Not if they came to us for rescue._

Oh, please. Maria couldn’t keep the grimace off her face. Even if everyone fled to the Forest, for whatever ambiguous quasi-living state awaited them there, eventually Strex would figure out how to destroy it. _Nobody_ was safe.   
“Then we’ll just have to finish this war before it becomes an issue, won’t we?” she snarled. “You are not the only one who has been lost to their tender mercies, Cecil, or John, or whatever the hell you want to be called. And if you want to be a _coward _and give the rest of us up, then you’d better keep an eye out behind you for my arrival in hell because I am _not _giving in without a fight.” Maria’s fingers had curled unnoticed into the man’s hair, and left white gouges in his arm where nails dug into bony flesh. After breathless seconds, the Commander let him go.

“Tonight.”   
The words were a promise.   
“We’ll get you out of here tonight.”

John flinched as he was released, but no noise of protest issued from his lips.

“… She is really intimidating for, what, sixteen?” Stark’s voice held a forced lightness to it as he ran one hand through his hair.   
“Fifteen.” Maria gave up on trying to restrain her scowl. “And yeah, I should damn well hope so.” That asshole _still_ wasn’t taking her seriously, was he?

“So uh, how useful exactly are we going to be to your whole rebellion schtick if we can’t even leave your custody without putting John at risk of whatever the hell that angel thing was talking about?”

Or… maybe he was, if he was directing important questions to her.   
She gnawed on her lip for a moment before answering. “I suppose you probably have some useful non-combat skills. After all, the being that was definitely not an angel did say you people would be necessary for victory, so there must be something.” Maria’s eyes stared contemplatively out at the woods. “And at some point we’re going to need to make an all-or-nothing push if we’re going to have the slightest chance of winning. Maybe we can get Cecil out of Night Vale, too, while still letting him broadcast and see what’s going on.” It was a fair question. “I suppose we may as well escort you four to Central as well.”

“Yeah, I had no intention of letting John out of my sight.” The smile that flashed across Stark’s face was cold, and exaggeratedly polite. “That’s exactly why I wanted to come along in the first place. No offense, but I don’t trust that smarmy fuck Coulson as far as I can throw him, or the SHIELD people we were told we’d be meeting up with. Out of curiosity, of course, I just have to ask—what happened to them? Did you folks do something to them, or did Strex chase them out, or what?” Blue eyes bored into her, blunt as a hunting knife in that wrinkled face.

“The vague, yet menacing government agency?” Maria blinked. “No, no. Not that I know of. That base was just abruptly deserted a few years ago, during the Homecoming game. Their helicopters are still around, though, and people do occasionally see congregations of black kestrels nesting in it.”

Stark’s expression was amusing, to say the least.  
“It happens,” she added. “You’ll get used to it.”  
“… right.”

Maria wiped her hands off on those khaki pants before straightening. “If any of you need to sleep, now’s the time. You’ll need to be alert if we’re going to move you safely without making it obvious for our corporate overlords to see. Don’t wander off.” 


	5. Darkness Has Always Got There First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm almost done writing! I passed 50k words a little while ago, which makes this by far the longest thing I've ever written, not even counting WIth Drops of Singing Static. Aaaand of course I also have ideas for a gazillion more little spinoffs, because that's what my brain does apparently  
Anyway  
Once I'm done I might speed up the posting, too, so we can all look forward to that! :)
> 
> Chapter CWs: Blood magic (slightly graphic, but not very)

A phone dinged.

Steve Carlsberg ignored it, at first, in favor of finishing soldering the tiny chunk of motherboard in front of him. And then his eyes widened.   
Very carefully, Steve put down the iron and the solder wire, and removed his eye protection before sitting back in the chair.

That was not his phone.

“Lydia?” he called. Was it his host’s phone? Because that wasn’t, that sounded, that sounded like—Steve stood, letting the chair roll halfheartedly across the carpet behind him. “Lydia, tell me that’s yours.”   
Silence.   
Oh right, she was out to get groceries, and her phone was presumably with her. It wasn’t Derrick’s phone, he was still out for re-education. Which meant…

Steve scrambled to the table where his backpack sat, all the worldly possessions he dared keep with him while he darted from house to house like this, and began to rummage through it, his hands shaking. Another ding, and a third, tinny and muffled beneath Steve’s equipment, but inescapably there. That was his spare parts box, here were the spare bloodstones, a warm hat knit in age-old ciphers, a broken mirror, and—there! Muscled hands clutched the prize: a cell phone embedded in a furry purple case, the screen marked with spiderweb cracks which leaked black slime from the top left corner inwards, all locked within a plastic bag.

The screen was lit.   
Steve let out a breath, as slow and measured as he could make it around the lump in his throat.   
This was Cecil’s phone.   
He’d found it hiding under the desk in the radio station after Cecil was kidnapped, cowering from the Strex officials that immediately repossessed the apartment, and coaxed it out by help of a gluten-free piece of shortbread. It hadn’t turned on in two years, and hadn’t had reception since a month after Cecil left. With trembling fingers, Steve unzipped the bag and laid it aside. He pulled on a pair of fresh latex gloves from his backpack.   
Took out the phone.

A text.

Three texts, in fact, from a contact only barely readable through the glitches surrounding it:

_im not alone anymore, cecil  
Maureen is here! and some others with her  
are they in night vale too?_

The breath hissed gradually from Steve’s lips. “I have to get this to Tamika,” he muttered.   
But what did this mean? Was Cecil… back? Steve couldn’t keep his teeth from sinking into the inside of his cheek as he thought, and the tang of blood as he bit absently down helped him focus. Was Cecil alive?

And then the realization struck him: Cecil had effectively spent years in Strexcorp re-education, if he was even still alive. There was no way in hell he could have escaped, and certainly if he had it would have been before now, right?   
Steve kept his gaze fixed on the phone before him.   
Maybe it was a coincidence. Hopefully it was a coincidence that the phone suddenly worked again, because if it wasn’t then that meant Cecil was back, and after this long he would have to be completely amnesiac at best, and turned to the Smiling God at worst, if Strex had actually _decided_ to bring him back to Night Vale.

God, he didn’t want to have to try and fight Cecil. He wouldn’t want to fight _Cecil _even if he _did_ stand a chance against him! Steve swallowed, staring into the light of the phone screen as if it could tell him something, _anything _better than this.   
Not this.   
What a damned mess.  
  


~~~

A desert much like Night Vale, two and a half years ago.

The young woman was not alone, for the first time in far too long.   
She halfway wished she was, because now she was no bigger than a toy soldier beneath the great masked figures blotting out the sun before her. Between that, and the looming basalt fortress carved into the mountain, she had never felt more powerless in her life than she did here, beneath the beating sun.   
Nevertheless, for lack of a better plan, former radio intern Dana Cardinal opened her mouth to speak.

Her voice was not the one the Masked Army heard.

~~~

The transfer to Base Camp Twelve went smoother than Natasha expected it to.

These kids, they’d been a hell of a lot more cautious than plenty of the adults she knew, casting some sort of spell involving blood and sand and chanting that would apparently disguise them; and they dressed the team in pieces of various kid’s scout uniforms, all beige and browns to blend in with the desert. It also helped, she was certain, that they moved during the night while Strexcorp’s yellow helicopters were mostly absent. There were still a few blue ones, of course, (the Sheriff’s Secret Police, apparently) and the helicopters painted with otherworldly murals of diving birds of prey still flew, but there were at least _fewer_ helicopters out and about. Fewer eyes to spot them.

They made the trek on foot.   
Trucks, as Natasha had to agree, would have been a lot easier to spot and harder to cover the trails of than a handful of shivering people. And after maybe two hours of walking, they were… there?

Annabelle _said _this was it. Well, she signed it, in any case, through hands that shook a little from the could. Maybe Natasha hadn’t interpreted her right, because this didn’t look at all like a rebel base or even a campsite. Just another stretch of desert, endless sand and endless, somewhat unnerving sky. She couldn’t even see that weirdly familiar shimmer in the air which had disguised the forest camp. Was this one just better disguised?

The girl’s eyes were fixed on the sky.   
She closed her eyes a moment, took two steps forward, three, and—  
“Here,” Annabelle’s words were quiet, and they still had that mild flatness to them when she spoke. “The door’s here.” She crouched, and with reddened hands brushed the sandy dirt from some kind of dark grey plate beneath it.   
Natasha squinted.   
A faint click, and another scout produced a sharpie marker, painting some swirling figure on their own tan arm. They touched it with a neatly-pricked finger, and the sigil lit up with a gentle golden glow. The scout joined Annabelle kneeling on the ground.

“You use some sort of magic, don’t you?” Natasha couldn’t keep the words from spilling from her lips. “To open it?”   
Her hands were clumsy when she belatedly shifted to sign her question out for the officer’s sake. Dimly lit as it was, she could see the plate a little better now, and while Annabelle hadn’t uncovered all of it, what she had was worrying: A diagram, all loops and whorls that seemed to change even as she stared at it, with nine dark stones glinting on its rim. Bloodstones, presumably. Night Vale seemed to like that sort of thing.

“What?”   
The scout with the light source, whatever their name was again, signed the question again. Oh. She’d gotten a word wrong.   
When Annabelle saw the corrected question, however, she grinned. “Oh. Yeah, it’s a type of magic. Good guess.” A pause. “Wanna give it a try?”  
“I don’t know how to—”   
“Oh, come on, half the Book Club didn’t even need instruction to figure it out. I didn’t. It just… it just moves you, sometimes. Besides, I’m curious what this place’ll think of a neutral outsider.”  
_I’m not a neutral outsider, _the thought invaded._   
_“I, alright?” Natasha took another step toward it, crouching next to the scout with the light. That thought was absurd, of course it was, she _wasn’t_ from anywhere on this continent, couldn’t have had contact with Night Vale before. Her ‘soul’ or whatever it was had never been dedicated to anything or anyone, how could it have been?   
She frowned.

There was Stark, she could actually see him now, staring at her as if he didn’t believe she’d ever go along with such obvious bullshit. His loss. Come to think of it, Natasha wasn’t sure why _she_ was going along with this whole magic thing herself, beyond that it felt… familiar. Somehow. She glanced up. “You gonna give me any hints?” Ugh, why were her fingers so clumsy? She needed to make a point of practicing ASL more.

“You’re doing alright. Relax.”   
_Kids, _Natasha grumbled as a couple of them seemed to giggle to themselves. John didn’t seem to be laughing either, at least, a frown traced into the furrows of his forehead. He had to know this, right? The personification of Night Vale, or whatever the hell he was, he had to know how it worked. Natasha let her eyes linger on the former prisoner a moment longer before looking back down at the metal plate.   
Focus.   
It just moves you, huh? If she could just relax…

That’s odd.

Natasha’s eyes narrowed, just a bit.   
The sky was dark and the wind was freezing, but the plate? This dark, metallic plate in the middle of nowhere?

It was hot to the touch.

A hiss of breath, somewhere off beside her. Natasha dragged one fingertip along a spiral of stone—because that’s what it was, not metal, _stone—_ignorant of the wispy smoke trailing from the contact. She didn’t remember pulling a knife from its hiding place along her ribcage, but there it was in her other hand.   
Blood.   
A single slash across the ball of her hand where fingers met the palm, and Natasha squeezed and let it

Drip,

Drip,

Drip.

Three drops, along the outer ring of spirals, sinking into dust.   
_Relax._   
Natasha didn’t stop, didn’t let her conscious mind intervene to tell her what a terrible idea this was, she just— she pressed her bloody hand into the center of the design, and held it there.  
One second.   
Two.   
It hurt, she couldn’t quite bite back the initial grunt as the sudden sensation cut through whatever trance she’d fallen into, but when Natasha finally drew back?

Her hand was whole, marked only by the faintest of white lines where her fingers met her palm.

“…what the hell?”   
That was Dr. Banner, wasn’t it? Natasha let out a shaky breath. Yes. She knew these people, of course she did, and of course Bruce was _concerned_.

“What the hell, what just—let me see your hand!”   
Strange, the way the scientist’s two clammy hands felt much more vivid on her skin than the burning slab of stone had been.   
Green eyes glinted in the too-faint light. “That’s impossible,” he murmured. Dr. Banner finally seemed to have remembered to keep his voice down, but a growing expression of glee brightened in his face as he began to gush, “that’s impossible,” he chuckled, “it’s amazing! Tony, back me up here, this is awesome, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, okay, can confirm.” Stark still seemed a little off put by the whole sequence, the whole ritual, at least judging by his voice. “That healing is, that’s, that’s pretty cool.”  
A pointed rasp interrupted the little science party. “That trick of yours is great and all,” John’s voice was tenser than usual, a little testy even. “But we should probably head inside. If it’s all the same to you. Assuming there is actually an entrance and not just a sort of miracle healing stone.”

Natasha didn’t even need to look to know where they were going, slipping the knife back into its hiding place. “There is.” How did she know this, anyway? “The slab is an illusion. Officer Annabelle?”   
The teenager’s grin had barely faded. “Nicely done.” Feet first, she slid into the hole to stand on something unseen beneath it. “It should stay open until Agent Romanov wills it closed, so come on down. There’s a ladder. We also put in a dumbwaiter sorta thing after we first found this place, for everybody who can’t just climb a ladder easily, but I think all of us here can manage.”   
Natasha came down next, followed by the duffel bag full of Stark’s armor. Thank the beams Annabelle had insisted on stuffing the suit in there, because polished, shiny hot rod red and gold? Not exactly subtle. Especially not in a desert in the middle of the night.   
She dragged it out of the way and waited in the dark as its owner followed, then Dr. Banner. John, when he half-climbed, half-fell down the ladder, seemed ill at ease in the darkness, though he also seemed to emit a barely noticeable white glow even now. Agent Coulson was much more confident in his steps. Unfortunately, it looked like that one scout with the light-emitting sigil had turned it off, because Natasha couldn’t actually tell how many Book Club members had joined them until one of them tapped something out on the wall.   
“All good. You can close the doorway now.”   
That sounded like Annabelle. Natasha wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, but she gave a sort of mental twist and—

Oh.

The slab settled back into full physicality, and the lights came on.

~~~

John stood in an ancient corridor, though corridor hardly seemed like the right word. It was more a—an artery, really, than a hallway, that was the descriptor which came to mind. There were nine of them. He knew it in his very bones, in the curling snake of his intestine, in the fuzz of static in his head that told him Station Management was watching. Well. Not Strex, obviously, even if they did technically manage the radio station now. The original Station Management.

“Cecil?”   
Agent Coulson was talking to _him, _wasn’t he?   
“I-I’m alright. I’m fine.” John fumbled with his cane, making a show of getting it arranged just so before he started walking. He didn’t need it. Not here, not in the very veins of Night Vale, the beating heart, the pulsing lungs, the— “Agent Romanov,” John forced the words out in spite of the hypnotic spiral of his thoughts. “How did you know to do that?”

He hadn’t known how to open it.

He hadn’t even known there had been a door.

He should have, knew he should have, and yet the door into this place had been as much a mystery to him as it would have been to Car—_don’t think about Carlos_. John bit his lip. Even if Carlos did still want him, love him, he couldn’t—_Stop it!_ He could brood over the love of his life, or the love of his former life, later. Whichever he turned out to be. “That thing with the door. Interlopers are not normally capable of opening it alone, at least not until they’ve been claimed.”   
This much, he did know.

“It just… spoke to me.”

Of course it did, what an extraordinarily helpful answer. John bit his lip.

“Did you know this was here?” Annabelle’s voice always seemed to sound like it was coated in a thin layer of dust, or ash, something soft and whispered. “We’ve been here almost a year now, but nobody knew it existed until Janice dug it up.”

“Janice found it?” He tapped the words out in Morse as he spoke, clicking fingernails against the handle of his cane. Annabelle was right beside him, after all. She could see it, and his hands shook too much right now to sign clearly.

“She did.” The girl gave a crooked smile. “Carlsberg was still in Strexcorp’s tender care, and Janice had a bunch of visions, something about another past. She dragged Tamika to the spot with her in some kind of flurry of anxiety. She couldn’t quite find the panel, y’know, the door, and it was really freaking her out, and then an angel showed up.” Annabelle paused. “They both claim the angel just left a note and a feather, and they found the door from there, slept in here until the next day, and went back to camp. Some of us have had our doubt about that, but, well. We weren’t there.”

Unsurprising.   
It had been four years, after all, the two of them had to have aged some. Tamika seemed like she was, what, sixteen now? Seventeen? And Janice may have started out a little younger, but she had always been a fast grower (he would get to talk to Janice again!).   
Oh right, John blinked, Annabelle had asked _him _something, too. “What was your question again?”  
“Did you know about this place?”

“No.” Basalt, out of place this far from any mountains. No, John had never set foot in this structure, this building, this beast in all his life.

All he knew was that they walked now toward its heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays! <3


	6. Dangerous, but Precious Too

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter CWs needed.

The hallway was beautiful.

Granted, Tony amended, it was just a hallway. But still. Damn.   
When the kid leading them, what was her name again, the deaf chick—Annabelle? Yeah, Annabelle. When she had Nat close the, close the burning panel thing that let them in, suddenly there were… lights? Not a lot of light, it wasn’t even quite enough to see color by, but it kept them from wandering into the walls. He couldn’t pinpoint the source, except for a handful of geometric patterns laid glowing and incandescent into the walls of the hallway. And those walls! That ladder couldn’t have been more than six feet long, but these walls stretched up to at least twice that, arching like some medieval cathedral above them in some sort of unfamiliar black stone. Something volcanic, maybe? Basalt?  
Tony tried running his hand along those patterns in the walls, but he couldn’t quite tell what it was that made it glow, it just felt like some kind of enamel etched into the rock. There were other etchings in it too, ones that didn’t glow, but they were so big Tony couldn’t even begin to make out the pattern behind them. He spent a whole minute poring over them before they finally had to start walking. This whole rough black stone with otherworldly engravings look wasn’t exactly his favorite, but just… wow.

It probably meant something.

But if he asked, the answer to how it all worked as far as these kids were concerned would probably just come down to “magic”.   
Tony sighed. _Magic my ass_, he muttered. _It doesn’t matter what you call it, there are still rules about how it works._   
Isn’t that the whole point of science? Discovering regularities in the universe and figuring out how to exploit them? And then Nat could just go and, go and do something like _that, _something that broke every pattern humanity’s recorded since the dawn of time, and all anybody would say about it was “magic”. Bullshit. At least Dr. Banner _had _to be thinking the same thing, right? He could hardly have missed it. I mean come on, Tony was hardly interested in publishing papers, but Bruce must be taking notes, there was so much to figure out here!   
That part was bound to be fun.

Tony snuck a glance at the other scientist, all soft shadows and muted violet. Banner was sliding callused hands along the surface of the wall as they walked, his face so close it brushed against the stone. Heh. Called it.   
“Amazing,” the whisper barely drifted all the way to Tony, warm breath on black stone. Bruce sped up again. He kept falling behind, trying to get a closer look at all these walls. He was actually beginning to regret that none of his PhDs were in geology, of all things—nuclear physics, yes, gamma radiation, yes, but geology? That was what he really wanted to know, here. Or architecture.   
“How old _is _this place?” The question fluttered from Bruce’s throat to echo in the air. “I mean looking at the floor, it isn’t exactly _new. _There’s patterns of wear all along the middle strip. Almost like… water or something.” Bruce cleared his throat. “I mean I’m not an, an archaeologist or a geologist or anything, but that’s what it looks like to me. And on the other hand, it’s all so clean, I’ve never seen anything old that was this clean. There isn’t even a hint of dust on these engravings! Have you people been dusting this entire corridor or something?”

“Why would we do that?” The kid next to him replied. Davon, wasn’t it?   
“Because it would get gross, obviously!” Somebody else interjected. “At least if it got wet, it definitely would. Which is weird,” she frowned, “because this place does at least get a little bloody pretty often and I don’t think anybody ever cleaned it up.”

“So it’s just always been like this? As far as anybody knows?” Bruce wiped one hand off on his pants.   
“As far as anybody knows.”

Funny, he couldn’t help the thought, that the veins of some great, pulsing animal should be so clean.

~~~

Dana first saw the Clouded Mountain almost two years ago, to date, if her phone’s calendar was to be trusted.

This, then, was how her life proceeded.   
After the piercing cold of the Dog Park, the Desert’s heat had been a welcome change. Even more welcome was the way hunger and thirst never seemed to rear their heads. Without that blessing, Dana had to admit, she would most likely be dead.   
The heat had not stayed a welcome change for long. By the end of her first month in this Desert Otherworld, she had given up on escaping the reality of the Mountain, instead settling in a cave by its surface, where the rock kept her a little cooler.

Astral projection was easier beside the blinking light.

By which she meant, the actual projecting herself from this body into another dimension was easier than usual. Choosing her destination, whether its time or its place, was not. Dana dearly wished she’d practiced more at home, before trying to do so in this waste where time and space were scrambled. She heard whisperings from time to time, almost like that of the Faceless Old Woman, or a particularly old bloodstone circle except less easily understood, and from far too many directions at once. The whispers were not very good company.

And then one day, a great masked army met her in her wanderings, vaguely humanoid beings of whom the smallest was just over twelve feet tall. They stretched up and up with void black skin and masks in all the colors of a festival. Dana had never seen masks that bright, or skin that dark.

She was scared, at first, as any young woman would be when faced with people who had the power to squish her to a fine-grained fleshy paste without so much as noticing her presence. But the army paused before her. And about when Dana tried the fourth language that came to mind, a warrior stepped forward with a knife, dripped a few bits of their blood onto a string, and offered her the necklace strung about it. The necklace was huge on Dana, of course, but she managed to wrap it into a sort of beaded harness about her body instead, and from then on she could understand them.   
The warriors, that is. Not the whispering.   
They didn’t want to stay, but they left the translator with her.

The army left six months ago.

This was unfortunate, because Dana could really do with a suitably intimidating corps of beings to execute her orders right now. The former radio intern stood as poised as she could manage atop a boulder on the side of the Mountain, overlooking a growing gaggle of people pooled on the sand beneath her. Growing, because stragglers were still popping into existence all over the place. Gaggle, because they didn’t seem the slightest bit willing to _shut up._

“… Dana?” Dana jumped at the sudden presence by her side. Who—The other woman grinned.   
“It _is _you.” Curly red hair, blue eyes, her face more covered in freckles than not—  
“Maureen?”

Warm arms closed about her, more real than anything had felt in months, and Dana almost fell off her rock with the way she melted into the hug. Beams above, she’d missed this! Human contact!   
“Dana,” the other woman breathed, “Dana, I can’t believe it’s you!” Maureen’s grin pressed close against her own coils of wiry black.

Dana didn’t need to consciously move her hands to feel them clutch at Maureen’s back, inhaling the scent of warm vanilla and lichen from her neck. It took over a minute before either of them let go. Even then, Dana kept one arm about the other woman’s waist. “It’s good to see you,” she smiled, but that didn’t begin to describe how she felt. Beams, she could hardly stand those words, so insufficient, they were—“I love you.”

She did not mean to say that.

Maureen froze.

Fuck. Dana’s breath trembled from her lips. She did not mean to say that, and now Maureen was, was— did she just screw this up, already? “…well?”

Maureen’s hand worked it way up to rest gently on the back of her neck. A cutting smile. “And _you_ are the most revoltingly adorable girl this side of the endless night.” In moments her expression lifted into a full-bodied grin again, and Maureen leaned back in and… oh.

The kiss between them did not last long, but when the other woman levered herself back again, her eyes seemed to sparkle as she spoke.   
“But yes, I love you too. Dana.”  
The red light shone blindingly off that curly red hair when Maureen turned back to the milling crowd. “You’ve actually been here awhile, I take it.” That one hand settled comfortingly on her shoulder. “What do you think we should do?”

Well they couldn’t all just camp outside.   
Nobody had tents, and the Desert tended to get cold at night. Dana allowed herself a smile. Was it the hand on her shoulder or just Maureen’s presence that made the chatter seem a little less overwhelming? Either way, the former intern gulped in a breath, and let it out. “I think…” it took a moment for her tongue to find the words, and then—“We go inside the mountain.”   
“Dana—”

“I know, I know,” she grabbed the woman’s other hand in hers, “Mountains don’t exist. They shouldn’t. It doesn’t make any sense, but this one does, the mountain we’re standing on, I know it exists because there is nothing else.” A squeeze. “And besides, people will freeze if they all stay out here. I found a fortress inside it, or at least I think that’s what it is, there’s plenty of room inside. We can all go inside, and, and work out who’s in charge from there!” Dana bit her lip. “It will all work out. I’ve been there, looking around, and the fortress contains no other living thing that I can see. It should be safe enough.”

Maureen’s free hand rose up again from Dana’s shoulder to her neck, and pulled her in for another hug. “I believe you.” A kiss, planted to the top of her head. “I’ll help you get their attention, and then we can be on our way.”

“I love you,” and this time the words were laughter, already free and exposed beneath the light instead of slipping unwilling from her lips in lonely confession.  
“You already said as much.”   
She felt nothing but cold when Maureen left her side to direct the crowd’s attention. “Night Vale,” Dana began, and faltered. Who was she? An intern, once, but not any more. Her future self had been the Mayor, Mayor Cardinal, but she wasn’t, she couldn’t be—that wasn’t her present. This was. She straightened her shoulders. Chin up, shoulders square, look just above their heads and slightly to the left, that’s what her future self would say. You need no-one but yourself, and they will follow you, because you contain multitudes. Great Aunt Velma used to crow that every chance she got, the spittle flying from her two cracked teeth.

“People of Night Vale.”   
Dana Cardinal swallowed.   
“These sands lie in the trail of giants. This is a desert, and like all other deserts it sleeps familiar,” how strange it was, to hear her voice from the outside. To hear her voice at all. “But unlike _most_ other deserts, this desert does not sleep alone.”   
Where did these words spring from? Was this what Cecil felt like, every time he made a broadcast? Did sentences well up from nowhere for him, clattering from silken static into void? Dana’s eyes desperately sought a friendly face, a face that did not stare up at her with dazed obedience or flinty irritation, how could Cecil _stand_ it? _Maureen_. There she was, Maureen, bright and conscious and _real _and oh—how long Dana had lurked in silence? How long had she been here alone and empty, waiting for the ache of home to fill her?

“The Mountain,” Dana’s Voice continued. “It lurks. It watches.”   
Her lips twitched as though through a dream. “It is the blinking light upon the clouded Mountain.” Sometime soon, that behavior would have to change, wouldn’t it? Dana frowned ever-so-slightly, though her worldly shell gave no sign of the movement, only speaking as it had without her intervention. “It is empty, now, but not forever.”  
“Together we can fill it.”  
And she was back.

~~~

Steve Carlsberg reached the base by sunrise, scraping inside mere inches behind the light of day. The tunnel he used was not a very common one, its entrance hidden in the hole under the parking lot of the Ralph’s. Fortunately, all those people huddling within that hole were not exactly Strexcorp’s favored audience either, and so had carefully tarped over the hole in the cement as if they didn’t exist. Steve honestly wasn’t sure why all the Night Vale natives seemed to think a bright blue tarp with the words “nothing here” scrawled across it was a worthy disguise, but if nothing else Strex didn’t seem to think they were worth uprooting (yet). He had to warn the Book Club. He had to warn _Janice, _if Strex had hauled Cecil back in here, and before they tried anything too horrible. Pressing his bloody hand to the center of the stone, Steve Carlsberg climbed a ladder into darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays, everyone! Or happy desperately-avoiding-the-holidays, if that's more applicable ;)


	7. No Hour is Ever Eternity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright. I know for a fact that some of you have been waiting for this chapter for quite a while-- so here it is! For the new year, have some happy reunions! I hope all of you get some happy reunions as well :)
> 
> Chapter CWs: moderately graphic injuries (pre-existing), death mention, and (unsurprisingly for Night Vale) some creepy mind magic

Base Camp 12 was different from the last.

Where the forest camp had been barely visible, a handful of sleeping bags and rope ladders dangling down tree trunks, this was a bona fide military facility. _Whose _military facility, Bruce had no idea, just as he hadn’t the foggiest when or even _how_ it was built, but it was inarguably a fortress. They’d reached the end of the hallway after a solid hour of brisk walking, sweaty and tired in the air so _perfectly neutral_ it had to be air conditioned—except, of course, that there wasn’t a single vent opening to be seen. And before them? There was just a wall. A blank, unornamented wall, free even of those glowing engravings which coated the sides of the hall.  
Until that kid leading them, Annabelle, sliced her hand open to drip blood on the floor, and walked straight through it into the fortress itself.

The fortress looked almost exactly like the hallway they’d spent so long trudging across, actually, as if the whole place was carved of one great piece of basalt. The engravings, too, were still here to emit their faint and hazy light that squirmed under his gaze. The Readers had apparently added a set of electric lanterns, candles, and the like to take the place from _dim _to passably well-lit, at least along the major walkways. Annabelle led them through the building in a winding path into a sort of lobby, where ancient plastic camping chairs sat littered across the floor.  
“Wait here,” she said. “Tamika will be here soon.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later, clipped words from the hallway over the sound of footsteps heralded the teenager’s approach.

“Tamika, please! You need to let me take an x-ray, your arm—”  
At the sound of that voice, John sat bolt upright, eyes fixed on the entrance.

Bruce shifted in his seat. If John was agitated, there must be something wrong, which meant he had to be prepared.  
“I’ll be fine,” that sounded like Tamika alright. Slightly hoarse, uncomfortably young, but unrelentingly brusque despite whatever the other voice was trying to tell her about her arm. “I need to make sure the team got here in one piece, that’s more important. Stop touching it!” She turned the corner.

Tamika was definitely injured.

Her right arm clutched to the opposite shoulder, her gait limping noticeably more than normal. More obviously, Bruce swallowed, she was covered head-to-toe in blood, and the unsettling shine of viscera. It was even spattered across her hair.  
_God, that must be a pain to clean, _came the thought.

“Annabelle!” the general barked. “You’re all here. Any trouble?” Tamika started to sign the question to make sure the other could understand it, winced at the movement of her arm, and instead began tapping it out in Morse code with her free hand. Behind her, a Latino man with unusually long hair and a grubby lab coat looked up from trying to get some kind of medical reading. Was he an _adult?_ Bruce felt a twinge of surprise. That must be the first adult he’d seen in Night Vale since they arrived.  
The man in the lab coat glanced up. Froze.

“… Cecil?”  
A quick glance at John showed his expression to be equally dumbfounded. This had to be someone John _did_ remember, then, right?

Tamika halted in her steps. “Oops,” she murmured. Swayed. “Carlos, why don’t you—”

“Carlos!”  
Bruce had never heard John so giddy, a child in a candy shop, his grin almost preternaturally wide. The man simply surged forward. In an instant, Carlos was on top of him, flinging himself across the room and into those scarred and tattooed arms.  
“Cecil, oh gods, Cecil! You’re alive!!!”  
“Of course I’m alive,” John’s voice was as rough as ever. “And Carlos, perfect Carlos, are you—”

“I’m fine,” the blatant adoration in that voice set a smile on Bruce’s face even through the stranger’s tears. This was a positively _adorable_ reunion. “All thanks to you.” Carlos hesitated before asking, ever-so-cautiously. “Cecil, what happened to your voice?”

_Not the best thing to point out, I take it._ Bruce felt like such an interloper here, but—well, he was curious. And John—or Cecil, or whatever—was _fascinating! _The Avengers as a whole still knew almost nothing about him! And now that his voice had been mentioned, John slipped into a sudden blankness, cold and serious.

“It’s… fine,” He gave a halfhearted smile. “_I’m _fine. Just a side effect.” He clutched the scientist closer, his arms tense and his face set. “They gave me a brand new set of pain receptors, and I had more opportunities than I would like to try them out. But never mind that,” John’s fingers slid from Carlos’s cheeks to his hair as he continued speaking. “I’ll get over it. And it doesn’t hurt nearly so much when I’m broadcasting. Or when I’m not so deeply tethered to this frail and fleshy mortal shell.” His… mortal shell. His body?

The man in the lab coat—Carlos, apparently, didn’t seem to notice the turn of phrase as anything out of the ordinary, instead lunging in for a kiss.

A _long_ kiss.  
Guess John definitely remembered the guy.

Bruce buried his smile and turned to face Tamika again. “General, er, Tamika,” he stuttered. He’d learned enough. Anything, so long as he didn’t have to keep watching John and Carlos. He felt uncomfortable just being in the same room with such an obviously intimate moment—but it was what it was, and the two of them had every right to this kind of reunion, so Bruce just did his best to ignore it. “Do you mind if I take a look at your arm? I am a doctor, well, not that kind of doctor, but I do know what I’m doing—”  
She made a face. “Carlos wouldn’t let up about that either. I was _trying_ to keep him away from Cecil, but I guess that’s not gonna work anymore.” Tamika glanced back with a smirk at where John and Carlos were still tangled in each other’s arms, faces flushed and hair already out of order. “I can handle my own injuries, you know, I’m not some helpless kindergartener anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.”

“I don’t know that you’ve ever been helpless, but you’ll still heal faster if you get your injuries tended to,” Annabelle pointed out. “We need you in good shape, Tamika, not barely limping along. Besides, it’s probably the blood loss that made you sloppy enough to forget about Carlos.” At the general’s glare, Annabelle placidly changed the subject, her hands not even particularly tense as they signed along with her words. “How’d your side of the mission go?”  
“I don’t know, did you all make it back?” The general retorted. “We were a decoy, not a standalone mission.” They must have some sort of abbreviation for that, since it only took Tamika a few seconds to tap it out in Morse code on the side of the chair.  
The deaf girl grinned. “Safe and sound, I don’t know that Strex even realized we were moving.”

Tamika nodded. Was that relief that flashed across her face? “So we made enough of a distraction, good.” Her smile was positively carnivorous as she continued. “We got a decent haul of needles and other medical supplies, I sent them off to medical bay with the injured so we can take inventory. The hospital’s stopped carrying non-Strex brand painkillers at all, though, as far as we can tell. So, y’know. That sucks. And there were only three dead and four major injuries on our side, so the losses weren’t too bad.”  
“Still not worth doing again, if we can possibly avoid it.” Annabelle frowned. She didn’t seem fazed at all by the body count, though grief and overwhelming fear leaked through in her eyes.

Dead. Bruce tried to keep his shock from showing. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that this was a war and not just some kid’s campout, that these were children fighting for their lives. It just didn’t feel… real. Everything from the colorful camp chairs to the scout-style uniforms made it feel like another lighthearted adventure—right up until someone staggered in covered in their own damned blood.

“No captives,” Tamika added. “but only because Errol blew himself up before anyone could stop him.” She flopped herself down into a chair. “They had a closer guard on the hospital this time,” for once, the girl sounded a little tired. “We might not be able to keep targeting it for much longer.”  
“You were attacking a hospital?” That was Tony, incredulousness plain in his tone of voice.

“We need to get medical supplies somewhere,” Tamika retorted. “Weapons are one thing, but medication is too heavily restricted for us to get from out of town. Even the adults have trouble smuggling that in, and they can’t be our only source of supplies, just in case they turn on us or get themselves killed!” There was an almost hunted look in her eyes.

_Poor kid, _he thought. _This is too much for her. Hell, I don’t blame her, it would certainly be too much for me. Probably for just about anyone, except maybe Director Fury. _Besides, how the hell were guns so much easier to get than medicines? Sometimes Bruce hated the USA. “Look,” Bruce tore his eyes away from the blood-soaked child. “Is there anything I _can_ help with?”  
Tamika glowered. “No x-rays. I suppose you can make sure the arm is set correctly, if you must. But I don’t need help.”

“Someone’s coming.”

John’s murmur cut through their conversation. He pulled away from the scientist in his arms, craning his neck around to make eye contact with Tamika. “They’re running.”  
The general barely had time to straighten herself up before—

A man rammed himself around the corner, pale and middle-aged and covered in scars, salt-and-pepper hair dangling scraggly from sweaty temples. He skidded to a stop. His hands came up as he ducked into a full-body flinch. Just as well, since Tamika and Annabelle between them already had a small crossbow, a knife, and what looked like a shotgun pointed at him.

“What are you doing here, Carlsberg?” Tamika was the first to speak. She lowered the knife in her hand, and Annabelle followed suit with the shotgun she seemed to have pulled out of nowhere. The man—Steve’s—eyes were fixed on John.

A whisper.

“Beams save us, he’s already here.”

~~~

Dana had never gone terribly far into whatever structure nestled deep within the Clouded Mountain. She had plumbed the heights, the depths, yes, but whenever she got too far toward what must be the core of the place, a vague sense of unease halted her in her tracks. It did not do to ignore a vague sense of unease. It did not do to ignore the voices either, though she knew better than to fully listen to them, and when she crept too far within, those whispers seemed to crescendo into screams, each one echoed from a thousand tongues. One way or another, she knew better than to keep searching. Closer to the surface, however, there was still plenty of space. Enough for all of Night Vale and more.

Not that this was all of Night Vale.

It was a practice run, as Maureen had put it. How could Dana stand to be Mayor, after all, if she could hardly speak before the whole of the town? How could she care for _all_ of them, if she could not care for all of this, this partial population?  
Obviously, the answer was probably mayoral powers.  
But even without them, it had to at least be some good practice. So far, she’d sorted out four squabbles over rooms, reassured eight separate people that this was not, in fact, the Dog Park and they were (probably) not going to be sent to re-education or mysteriously disappear because of showing up here, and furthermore that Dana had not encountered a single hooded figure since her arrival. Unless she counted the handful of masked giants who also happened to be wearing hoods. But then, they had distinct physical forms beneath their colorful robes, and also seemed able to make sounds that could conceivably be speech, and there was no constant ringing wherever the masked army walked.  
Also, several more citizens had complained about the lack of lemonade, snacks, and Eyeless Things Beneath the Carpet to clean up after them, likely because there did not seem to be any carpets. There also did not seem to be any furniture. This was also a common source of complaint, despite the fact that there was no _possible way _for Dana to do _anything whatsoever about it._

As such, she was certainly not trying to escape.

It was purely a coincidence that Dana’s wandering feet had directed her back to a familiar platform near the top of the mountain, to a bloodstone circle tucked beneath the watchful gaze of three statues carved into the wall which absolutely did not resemble angel, because angels did not exist. It was in this bloodstone circle that she had first achieved astral projection, after all. She had every reason to want to visit it. The fact that no-one else seemed willing to slip so near to the decidedly not angelic guardians was beside the point.

Dana knelt. The press of cold stone against her knees and along the top of her feet was blissful in this almost painful heat. Her hands, too, lay flat against the ground. She never could account for why, but the whispering was quiet here, not gone completely but reduced to a humming murmur in the back of her head, a pleasant white noise forming a background for her thoughts. Maybe it was the triple guardians, maybe it was the bloodstone circle’s shielding effect. Beams save her, maybe it was the way the sky stretched out above her, uninhibited and yet contained by the Mountain’s endless bulk. After a few more seconds, Dana stretched out on her back instead, her head resting nestled between the feet of the central statue to gaze out at the clouds. That was better. She felt far more comfortable this way, though something about the statue tingled where it made contact with her skin. It was almost… musical? It seemed to quiet the voices in her head even a little more, until they were nothing but shifting static far away from where she laid.

Perhaps on any other day, Dana would have noticed the soothing calm which spread soft tendrils through her mind. Perhaps on any other day, she would have cared. But here, and now, with the taste of home still lingering on her lips and the haze of exhaustion on her mind, she simply closed her eyes.

Here and now, Dana Cardinal slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!  
I'm *almost* to the end, on the writing side, so maybe I'll move to a once a week posting schedule next time? We'll see. I have way too many writing projects rn.


	8. Must Make Their Own Good Fortune

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... Okay I was going to work on this some more, but I got distracted by a bunch of my other projects. Oh well?
> 
> Chapter CWs: eldritch magic

“Beams save us, he’s already here!”

Steve backed up against the wall, bracing himself on the solid surface until he stopped shaking a little.   
_No, no, _no, his thoughts seemed to run around in circles, _no no no no nonono!_ He couldn’t let this happen. _How_ could he let this happen?! This was, this was Cecil, and those must be his handlers, and Strex must be influencing them all because there was no way Cecil had escaped on his own, not after all this time. And now, because he’d failed to warn the Book Club in time, now they would all die. Or worse, Strex would win! Just look at that! Cecil was, Cecil was trembling, eyes wide in that unseeing face. The true Cecil, the old Cecil, he never would have done that. But looking around at all the other faces, Steve saw nothing but confusion. Damnit. Cecil must have them wrapped around his little finger by now—

“Explain.”  
Tamika, thank the Beams! Tamika was a breath of fresh air with her impassive face and tense shoulders, cautious as always. And was that… Annabelle, next to her?   
When Steve replied, he began signing along with his words, the gestures full of sudden stops and abrupt transitions. “Yes, yes, of course, I’d be glad to explain.”   
Gods, what about Janice? How much had this, this not-Cecil already ruined?   
“This isn’t Cecil. Or, this is Cecil’s body, Cecil’s soul, but he’s not really in control. He can’t be.”

“Why not?” So cold, the General’s voice was so cold.   
Steve tried not to pay too much attention to Carlos, the poor man. His heart had been broken enough at the start of this damned war, how could he forgive Steve for breaking it again?   
“How did he escape?” Steve filled his voice with every inch of conviction that he could. It didn’t matter if he stuttered. What mattered was that Tamika _believed him. _What mattered was that they got out of this alive. “They _knew_ Cecil was a danger even locked up, Strex _never_ would have left him with anything less than a full guard. Hell, we know they took him out of Night Vale! Cecil doesn’t even have most of his powers when he’s outside. How in the world did he get out?”  
“I escaped,” Tamika prompted. “Why not him?”   
Did she really not believe him? _No, no_, Steve pushed the thought away. She was just… deliberating.

“No disrespect, you know that, but you are a _kid_, General,” Steve kept his voice as calm as he could. He could feel his nails digging into his shaking palms, so close to drawing blood. Making eye contact with her was hard. He kept wanting to look over at Cecil, but didn’t think he could _stand _to see the look on that too-familiar face. “You may be a force to be reckoned with, but Strex had no way of knowing that when they caught you. As far as _they_ knew, you were an unruly, precocious, but ultimately fallible kid who jumped into this mess so far over her head that she couldn’t even see the surface.” He paused. Let the words sink in. “They already _knew _Cecil was a threat,” one finger stabbed at where Cecil’s body trembled in the center of the room, “and one they would never be able to defeat within the confines of our town. I’ve _seen_ it before, Tamika, _please_ believe me. The lines and the circles and—I know what I’m talking about. Cecil never could have escaped on his own.”

“You’re right.”

What? Cecil was—   
“I’m sorry,” the creature that could not possibly be Cecil wrapped its arms around itself, drawing away from Carlos’s unresisting hands. “I didn’t, didn’t escape, not on my own, not ever really,” he gave a hollow little laugh, “I don’t think they’re Strex, they call themselves the Avengers— but I don’t know. And I just brought them here,” that stranger’s voice spiraled upward in pitch. “without even thinking! Beams above, you’re right, I never should have come back here!”

_Sorry_, the thought rang wooden in Steve’s head. _Sorry?! _He couldn’t keep the growl from rising from his throat. Cecil would never have-This _creature _didn’t get to be _sorry _for squatting in the puppet of his brother-in-law’s flesh, didn’t get to _apologize _for its crimes. It was just trying to gather sympathy, it had to be! This was worse than what had happened to Kevin! At least the creature _Kevin_ had become was honest about everything he’d done.

“Wait!” 

Who the hell was that?   
One of the handlers stepped forward, brown haired and scarred by age and magic, not just physical injuries. Why did he look so _familiar_?

The stranger sucked in a breath. “Mr. Carlsberg,” he signaled the other handlers to stand down as he began speaking, wearing an expression of vague, untrustworthy benevolence. “My name is Agent Phil Coulson, I work for the vague yet menacing government agency. And I know exactly who you are.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed at your ability to do your job?” Steve drawled.   
“That isn’t what I meant.” Coulson gave a reptilian smile. “I don’t know who you are because I work for SH—for the vague yet menacing government agency, I know who you are because I used to live here.” A complicated series of twitches set off in his right hand. Was that… the Dreadnought Scout recognition signal? “You used to be in the Boy Scouts, correct?”

Steve sighed. “Scouting in the rest of the world is very different from scouting in Night Vale. But yes. You should know that already.”   
“Do you really think I would do anything to wreck one of my organization’s best recruitment centers? What’s more, do you _really believe _I have no idea who I’m working with?”

“No, Agent,” his tongue was bound to get him in trouble again, wasn’t it? “I believe you just don’t give a flying fuck.” A thought made itself known that he should probably back off a little. Steve ignored it. “I believe you’ve been in contact with a certain Smiling God already, and that it doesn’t even matter where you’re from because it has turned you to a hollow, grinning shell just like everything else it touches. It certainly hollowed out half my PTA in the first _month _of this damned war. I _believe _you’ve done the same to Cecil—or failing that, tricked whatever broken and unrepentant corpse remained into following you. Because honestly?” Don’t look at Carlos, _don’t _look at Carlos, the litany kept on looping through his head.   
“If Cecil and the not-so-little horrors nesting in his head couldn’t break themselves out? Nobody else ever stood a chance.”

There was silence.

Finally, Coulson spoke.   
“I have not encountered the Smiling God, not to my knowledge. But I know Night Vale. You need Cecil, you all do, he is the Voice of the town and all Strex’s replacement can ever manage is a pale imitation at best. You know this. I know this.” He paused. “Would you recognize the Smiling God’s touch if you saw it?”   
“Yes,” two voices in unison, Steve and Tamika both.   
Coulson’s head tilted to one side, just a bit, as if in some sort of apology. His right hand raised itself to point at Cecil, two fingers out, two tucked behind his palm to form a sort of mock pistol. A calm word.   
“Bang.”

It took a moment for anything to change. First, the room went dark, violet shadows no longer sulking in the corners of the room. Second came the intake of breath, a rush of sound in the void, and a voice that sounded like it had been dragged for miles along a gravel road made a noise—a grunt, really. “Ow!”   
Was that blood, the shining substance seeping from the perfectly round hole in his thigh? It almost looked more like ink, dark and thick in the lack of light. Cecil repeated himself. “Ow,” that voice now smooth like cinderblocks about his neck. He shuddered once, twice, and everything about him was movement, everything about him was sound, a ringing in the ears of every listener.

_It shouldn’t be possible_, Steve thought, the only thought that survived the overwhelming and omnipresent ringing. _It shouldn’t be._ But—and here was the key, here was the vitally important bit of information which underlined itself in Steve’s mind even as the world faded away—it _was_.

Cecil, or at least Station Management, was back.

~~~

Tony woke to see the frantic man who had the nerve to straight-up argue with Coulson clinging to John’s chest like a drowning sailor.

“Oh god, Cecil,” Carlsberg _sobbed, _“Oh god. It’s really you, it’s really _really _you, I can’t believe it!”

All at once, John’s face went from dazed to a sort of angry disgust.   
“Me,” came an uncharacteristic monotone. “Of all people, Steve, you should know! Station Management is not _me!” _A single shove sent the poor man reeling—but it seemed Carlsberg was used to this sort of treatment, since he only wiped the snot and tears from his face and offered a tentative smile.   
“I know, I know,” he mumbled. “But the Smiling God isn’t in there, Cecil, that’s a good thing! I guess you really got a stroke of luck in finding these folks, is all.” One hand lifted to brush a silver curl from his forehead. “I never would have guessed. And I had to guess, you know. The dotted lines and the arrows don’t say as much outside of Night Vale, and outside of Desert Bluffs.” He sniffed. “He is clean, right Tamika?”

The black girl’s fingers nursed a killer headache. “Yeah,” she groaned. “That’s pure old Night Vale horrors alright.” Of everyone in the room, only Annabelle seemed to be really coherent, if bleary-eyed. The perks of not being able to hear that damned ringing, Tony supposed.

“Cecil!” Carlos was finally awake, gasping into consciousness, and John was beside him before Tony could even blink. “Cecil,” the scientist doubled down, “_Cecil, _are you okay? You just got shot, you—”  
“I did,” John’s expression softened immediately. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I will be okay, it’ll just take a little time. Barely even hurts yet, I mean that’s probably the adrenaline reaction still, but you know what I mean.” He cradled Carlos in gentle arms as if it was the scientist who’d been injured in his stead. “How about you? I know Station Management can be a little harsh if you aren’t used to them, and I can’t really do much to keep them calm anyway—"

_Sickeningly sweet_, Tony rolled his eyes, but still couldn’t keep the smile off his face. Adorable.

“I mean you should be okay, Station Management would never hurt you,” John rambled, a frantic note in his voice. “I mean I would, I would rip them from my flesh with my very fingernails if they hurt you, not that that would do much to dissuade them, I mean they aren’t exactly bound to a physical form, and they kept coming back whenever Strex tore out the Eye,” John stammered.

What the hell _was_ Station Management anyway?   
But John finally straightened up, pulling himself away with stilted formality. “Anyway,” he finished. Even Tony could see how reluctantly he drew his hands away to his sides. “I’m, I’m glad you’re alright, is all. Hope I didn’t scare you too much,” a shaky smile bloomed as he glanced up at Tamika and Carlsberg, hands shaking, milky eyes open wide. “I’m sorry about all this.”

How the hell could he be _sorry _about this bull? It wasn’t his fault his damned captors apparently might have some way to influence him even after being freed!

“Look,” Tony took a deep breath, something hard and angry on his face. “John, Cecil, whatever you want to be called—You just got _shot_! That isn’t something to apologize for! Besides, these people obviously give a shit about you.” Most of them, at least. Tamika Flynn seemed weirdly indifferent to the whole affair. “And to be honest, it’s pretty obvious that you care about them too. You’re a decent guy! Hell, as far as I’m concerned you’re a pretty damned heroic one too, if you’re at all willing to come back here into this bloody war zone.” Speaking of which, how the hell _was_ there a goddamned war zone _in the continental US and everything_ that Fury didn’t even know existed?   
It took conscious effort for Tony to force himself to relax. “Now if there’s nothing else,” his eyes flicked up to meet Tamika’s, “can we go ahead and work on winning this war?”

~~~

Dana Cardinal moved in a dream.

She barely remembered waking, for her mind was filled with the twilit susurrus of feathers and hushed voices. What she did recall was a set of instructions, a list of components. In her more lucid moments, Dana recognized them as tools of the trade in which she was maybe still an intern. A microphone. An antenna, and a smooth curved surface at its base. A blinking light. A mountain.

John Peters took one look at her and screwed his eyes shut, calligraphing protective sigils into his skin as she passed.

Dana Cardinal did not notice.

Maureen grasped her hand in a silent plea, but Dana took no heed. She had to keep going.

When at last she had the parts together, in a small flat expanse along the mountainside, Dana felt her mind clear a little. A radio station, she realized. She had to build a radio station. And so, feverishly, she worked.

When dawn once more touched the horizon, a dozen townspeople were gathered at the edge of the clearing. By the time the sun set, Maureen had returned, the only human left. Dana frowned. She was stuck, she had made no real progress since about noon. It should be working. And yet—Maureen sat down by her side.

“Dana?” A hesitant question.   
Dana opened her mouth, tried to respond, but the only sound to emerge was the buzzing of a thousand flies.

Maureen understood. “Radio, huh?” A kiss, gentle and soft. “Do you know why?”   
She tried to shake her head in reply, but the world immediately began to spin softly on itself when she moved. She lurched sideways. Something must have managed to indicate her frustration, however, because by the time the world stopped rippling, Maureen was crouched in front of her, picking through the wires. Dana felt a surge of anger from outside herself—how dare this mortal interfere in their business, in true and divine works—  
“That should do it!” Maureen glanced back at her. Smiled, a hint of nervousness in her gaze. “You had a diode on backward, it should work now. Also there was a cockroach stuck in the microphone. I took it out for you.”

The voices silenced.   
Dana just about had time to croak out a barely-intelligible thank you before her head hit the ground, and the world went dark.


	9. If Today is Not Your Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...pretty much all my other WIPs right now are Good Omens fanfics, and I love Good Omens, and they're a lot of fun to write-- but also omg that's so much monotheism! So much. I am very not Christian, and it has been a *relief* to finally make some progress on this again, and get to write some creepy pagan shit  
Anyway.  
Hope y'all are doing well?
> 
> Chapter CWs: eldritch horror, possession, blood magic, vaguely described aftermath of Strex drugs

It was Coulson who found her.  
He’d had a funny feeling, ever since Agent Romanov failed to show up to that meeting. It had taken a minute to recognize that feeling for what it was, but, well. It was a bad idea to ignore any hunches in Night Vale. And in this case—Phil found himself wandering the arteries of the base, his mind filled with a familiar strain of humming that he hadn’t heard in far too long.

Eventually he stumbled upon a door.

Black and shining, plainly of the same material as the walls. There was no sign of a trap around its edges, no sound beyond its bulk, nothing out of the ordinary.

Phil poked it with one pinky.  
Nothing.

Of course, that didn’t actually mean it was _safe_. Nothing in Night Vale could ever be assumed to be safe. But that funny feeling urged him to open the door, and nobody had heard from Natasha, and—Phil gave in. He used one tentative foot to shove the door open, quickly, catching it with his hand before it hit anything.

The room was dark.

Phil drew the knife from his belt and opened a small slash on his hand. Traced a sigil on his wrist. He blew on it, as an activation signal, and the sigil lit the room in its faint golden glow.

The first thing he noticed was seven angels.

Statues of angels, anyway, shining against the light of his spell, carved wholesale from enormous chunks of bloodstone. And in the center—  
“Natasha,” he breathed.

Phil took a moment to finish scanning the room before he moved, but there seemed to be nothing hostile in sight. He bowed. “Erikas,” he murmured, and a cool smile graced his face. He didn’t _know, _exactly, that this was the right thing to do. But it was better to be polite, just in case.  
The whispering died.  
“I am going to take my teammate back, if it’s all right with you.” _Or even if it isn’t, honestly, _he thought. _Fury will have my hide if I lose her here. _When nothing seemed to smite him down at the thought, Phil cautiously inched into the circle. Did Natasha… _realize _that she’d wandered straight into the center of a bloodstone circle? Did she know what to do with one?  
A poke.

Natasha didn’t stir, but on the plus side, nothing exploded.

Better not to wake her up, he figured, until after they left the circle. Instead, Phil hefted her up by the arms, hauling the unconscious agent over his shoulder and gingerly stepped out of the circle. Into the corridor. He draped her out on the ground, red hair against smooth black rock. Gave her shoulder a gentle shake.

“Urgh…” Natasha rolled over. Her eyes cracked open, shining brown in the dim light. Her gaze fixed on the light on his wrist. “… what the hell is that?” she slurred.  
Phil gave her a bright, cool smile, and wiped the blood from his wrist, the light flickering out of existence as he did. “Nothing. How do you feel?” _He _certainly felt better. Less panicked. Hopefully Natasha wouldn’t be too badly damaged from the encounter, either—but Phil felt his heart clench when his agent only blinked, uncomprehending.

“I feel…” a pause. Her eyes tracked something Phil couldn’t see, from the ceiling to the walls and back again, swaying gently from side to side. “God, this is the third worst migraine of my life.”  
“Only the third?” this time, the grin Phil cracked was actually halfway to genuine. “You’re doing better than most people would be, then. The bloodstone circles built into this place are way too ancient and powerful for most Night Valians to stand to _use_, let alone fall asleep in.”  
“It was… quiet. Loud. I don’t know,” Natasha made some frustrated noise. “Better than the buzzing out here, or it was. But the buzzing went away, I think.”

“Just as well.” What _buzzing? _Phil frowned. An interloper thing, maybe. He’d have to ask the scientists later. But—well, Carlos had never mentioned that to Cecil, or if he had, it had never got on the radio. And Carlsberg never said anything of the sort, but then, Carlsberg had always been a little odd.

“I—” Romanov froze. Her eyes narrowed. “I need to do something.”  
She stood up, the motions jerky and uncoordinated, and Phil swallowed. Natasha, _uncoordinated? _Even climbing to her feet, apparently, was enough exertion to set her panting for a few moments, her hand resting flat on the wall. Little bands of light lanced through the stone at the contact, pale gold in pure black. She stood there for a moment, gaze fixed blankly ahead, brow furrowed in concentration. “Excuse me,” she said at last.

“Agent Romanov,” Phil rested a hand on her shoulder, “you need to take a moment, to sort out your senses—” the touch would have had more effect on a charging bull than it did on Natasha.  
“No,” she spoke, “I need to, need to do this.” Her words were even more slurred, now, than they had been, her steps disoriented. Robotic.  
“Natasha—”  
When Agent Romanov turned back to face him, and her mouth opened, it was not words which issued forth, but a hundred humming voices, clashing like thunder amongst themselves. Phil staggered back. Idiot. He should have recognized the signs, should have realized she was… possessed…  
Phil looked away hastily. He could feel their presence, alright, an inimitable pressure leaning on his mind. It eased a little when he broke eye contact, at least. “Alright then,” he stammered. “Do what you will.” Not that the beings in Romanov’s mind cared for his permission. He raised his arms in surrender, started crooning ancient chants of shielding under his breath.  
_Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch me, _he thought. _Please don’t touch me, I do _not _invite you, please oh beams—_

The creature that directed Romanov’s body turned away. And off she stumbled, in the direction of the stairs.

~~~

In another world, Dana Cardinal prepared for war.

She didn’t want to prepare for war. If she had her way, the people of Night Vale would stay out of it, nice and safe in the desert. But Maureen insisted, and the people insisted too. They had to be allowed to help. If they want. If anything happened, that let them go back home, because despite Dana’s conviction they really didn’t see a way to get there just yet.

Hopefully they wouldn’t need to.  
After all, the Masked Army had returned, and seemed willing to help.

Actually? Scratch that, they weren’t _willing _to help, they were intent upon it.  
“It is our Duty,” Kaphr’s voice had rumbled through every bone in Dana’s body. “To hold It caged. It told us to, before the end of all. We will not abandon our god, so if you can take us to It—”

“I will,” Dana had no idea where the confidence in her voice came from. How were they supposed to get back to Night Vale in the first place? And from there on to Desert Bluffs? But she knew it would happen, knew it in bone and blood and the very flesh of her liver, trembling away in her gut. Night Vale’s missing citizenry would find their way home soon. “Trust in the Mountain.”

She’d told Cecil as much, when the radio had connected them.  
The Masked Army would go to Desert Bluffs, and the displaced citizens would head home to Night Vale. They’d drive Strex out of Desert Bluffs first, and so leave the escape route closed off, and then narrow in on Night Vale. Trust in the Clouded Mountain. In the beings which guided it, which guided _her_. Everything would be fine.

Dana’s eyes were fixed on the horizon, nervous. Everything would be fine.

~~~

Natasha swayed before the old oak door.

Almost done, her work was _almost done. _A knife appeared in her hand. Where had she gotten it from, anyway?  
No matter. It was here.  
And now it was embedded in her arm, tracing sigil after sigil in a bleeding bracelet around her wrist. Natasha felt no pain. She was used to it. Her other arm was already a mess of bloody magic.  
_There, _she thought. _The last two strokes_—

Natasha gasped.  
The spells, the spells, they _hurt _now, burning into her skin like irons to drag them down. Her breath panted of its own volition, in and out and in and out. She heard some kind of groan issue from her mouth, or what she thought was a groan. It came out sounding like the beating of wings.  
Nevertheless, she forced her hands to raise, clenching the blade between them. Heat trickled down her palms.

“I bind this door,” she spoke, “a portal to the heart. I bind this door, with power of the heart.” The words were simple, though she wasn’t sure how she knew what they meant, or that she should say them. They certainly weren’t in English. Or Russian, or any other language she knew. It was just… words. Words engraved on her wrists, engraved on the door, engraved on her very soul. Words with power.

And with the blood on her hands, she traced strange symbols on the frame of the door, that squirmed and hummed beneath her gaze.

Her heart surged.  
Natasha knew something was wrong. She knew she wasn’t in control, here, but it felt… right, somehow, as she placed her hands, fingers spread, on the door. Perfect.  
She spoke, and in her mind spread honey tendrils of numbness, like a sweet and loving fog.

“The door is formed. The door is bound. The door is open!”

And the world went white.

~~~

Steve Carlsberg knew what would happen.

It was written on the sky, slathered across the stars in points and circles and dotted lines. Obvious. He didn’t like it, but—well, there was nothing he could do to avoid it! It would all happen to someone, no matter what he did to avert it. He was just lucky that none of Janice’s people had noticed, yet, none of them had seen it in a vision as far as he knew. Janice would not be happy with him. Steve blinked water from his eyes. Janice would hate this.

His hands trembled on the steering wheel of his borrowed police jeep.

Another ten minutes to the dead drop.

They already knew, Steve reminded himself, it wouldn’t help anything to show them that he knew too. And if he didn’t show up—he restrained a shudder. No, better this than what would happen if he didn’t show, didn’t keep pretending it was safe enough to visit. Someone would pick up the month’s food provisions eventually, either way. Better it was him.

_Even though you know damned well what’s waiting for you? _

Steve gnawed on his lower lip. He didn’t notice the coppery taste that filled his mouth, didn’t notice the tapping of his foot.  
_Yes, _he answered his own unspoken question. _Even so._  
Gods, this would be so much easier if he didn’t know. If he couldn’t see it so clearly in his mind’s eye, terrified children screaming from their beds, Tamika’s face fixed in a plastic grin before him. _Though they await me with doom in hand. What choice do I have? _

Silent and grim, Steve Carlsberg drove his way into the Strexcorp ambush.


	10. A Huge and Savage Conscience

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof.  
I've kinda fallen out of the habit of writing recently, but I'm trying to fix that, and maybe a little more of a sense of urgency will help? So yeah. Officially switching to weekly updates. Hopefully I can coax my brain into doing its job again sometime soon. Honestly, some extra feedback would be appreciated, since that always seems to help-- I can't even do my fucking readings for uni, my brain is being such a little shit. 
> 
> Anyway. I hope you folks are having a better time than I am. 
> 
> Chapter CWs: hostage situation, interrogation drugs mention, death mention-- see the end notes if you want more detailed warnings

There was a door.

There was a door, where there had been no door before.  
It was shaped of ancient oak, inset into one wall of the mountain interior, in a great round room where Dana had taken to lurking to receive comments—a sort of pre-mayoral office, almost, just close enough to the middle of the Mountain to make everyone else uncomfortable enough that they didn’t like coming in to complain. Dana didn’t notice the discomfort anymore. And Maureen seemed willing to put up with it from time to time, for her sake if nothing else.

In any case, she thought she heard voices on the other side of the door, chattering amongst themselves. They didn’t sound like angels. They sounded like people, like kids, mostly. When she poked it, the door neither exploded nor tried to eat her, which she took as a promising sign, so Dana pressed her ear to it as well.

There were definitely voices.  
“I don’t know,” an older voice was saying, “I found her in one of the statue rooms, and she was—well, you know.”  
“That’s the third time in the past month,” a girl’s voice, flat. “I don’t like it. They should leave us alone—beams, if the Erikas want to talk to us they can just _talk _to us anyway! They don’t need to—they don’t need to _drive_.”  
“How do you know it’s the Erikas?” the first voice demanded, and there was a note of hidden panic in his voice. “Why not something else? The beams? The Prince? The enemy?”

The girl practically snarled her answer. “It’s _not _the Enemy,” the capital letter was clear in her tone. “If it were— but it isn’t, Agent. I know.”

Dana pursed her lips. That voice sounded familiar, the younger one, it sounded like someone she knew. Or at least someone she’d met, unusually rough for her age. After a moment’s reflection, the answer drifted to mind.  
Tamika Flynn?

Dana felt a slight twinge of surprise. Tamika Flynn. Yes, that sounded right. What was Tamika Flynn doing on the wrong side of an old oak door? Or maybe—maybe it was Dana who was on the wrong side of it. She was technically in the Dog Park, after all. Sort of. Maybe. The Dog Park was bound to be the wrong side of everything, the old oak doors included, after all.

Should she open it?

Dana shuddered. Apparently not, judging by the wave of dread washing over her.  
She drew away, rubbing suddenly-cold cheeks with her hands. Maybe Kaphr of the Masked Army would know, or maybe the answer would come to her on its own. Or perhaps Cecil would say something, and her musings would all be rendered moot. For now, Dana settled herself down with her tentative battle plans and got back to work.

~~~

“Tamika?” the voice at her elbow was even, but bristling with forced calm. “We just got the news. Carlberg and the pick-up crew didn’t report back last night.”

Tamika whirled around. First that interloper got steered around like a puppet into opening a door to who knows where, and now— _oh, fuck._ Her eyes widened. _Janice_. “Does anyone else know?” Janice, Janice, did Janice know?

The messenger shook his head. “No, General, just me and Ella. Or not within the Book Club, at least. I was meeting up with my mom last night, and she was supposed to be in the pick-up crew meeting Carlsberg in town to distribute supplies. Nobody’s found any of them since they left. Ella and I figured you’d want us to keep it to ourselves until you heard, but I’m sure anybody else who goes to visit is gonna learn about it too. The adults aren’t really keeping it secret.”

Tamika let out a slow breath. Her eyes were fixed on the boy. Calculating. “Of course not,” she managed. “They’re panicking.”  
“And… are you?”

Her mouth opened. Closed. “Report to the tactics room, with me, in ten minutes. Find Maria. _Don’t tell anyone _what this is about, especially not anyone who might tell Janice. Got it?” At the messenger’s nod, Tamika swung around to glare at Agent Coulson where he still kept casting worried glances at the red-haired interloper. “Your employee should be fine if you give her some time, Agent Coulson. Don’t worry about it too much, all gods who receive homage are cruel. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.”  
When the messenger dipped his head in acknowledgement and left, Tamika grabbed the nearest scout by the arm. Alexei. Good, he knew what to do.  
“Alexei, keep an eye on them. Don’t let Agent Romanov hurt herself when she wakes up, and let her know what happened.”

The boy saluted. “You got it!” His half-smile stayed strong. How on earth did they all have so much confidence in her, anyway? She wasn’t even a scout! All she’d done was survive.  
“Thanks.” Tamika kept her stride unhurried as she left.

Janice.

Oh beams, she didn’t want to tell Janice. Janice was brilliant, her best strategist—but her attachment to Carlsberg would make things so much more complicated. Especially because—well, Strex was bound to know what they had, with Carlberg. They would guard him like they’d guarded Carlos, if they had the slightest bit of sense. This time, however, Tamika was not prepared in the least to risk Cecil’s involvement, even if it _was_ the only way to get the prisoner out. Assuming they’d thought to take him prisoner.  
There was this sinking feeling in her stomach.  
Janice would not like this.

To be honest, the thought of _not _telling her made even Tamika uncomfortable. But if Strex had Steve Carlsberg in their care, what other choice did she have? He wouldn’t be able to keep _anything _from them, that much was already clear. No-one could, if they were capable of fear. And Steve Carlsberg—he lived his _life _in fear, or so Tamika had gotten the impression. He knew too much. If Strex learned, if Strex learned everything that Carlsberg knew—maybe they had already, maybe it was already too late—what chance would the Book Club have? The only reason they’d been able to survive thus far was because no-one knew their desert half as well as they did. Tamika gnawed on her lower lip.  
_Calm down, _she growled to herself. _We haven’t lost yet. _

She turned into the tactics room.

This room, unusual for the underground base camp, was brightly lit, battery-fueled lanterns scattered about every available surface. The center was taken up by a set of square plastic folding tables, a scale model of Night Vale and Desert Bluffs inexpertly built from legos sitting on their surface atop a white and purple checkered tablecloth. Alexei had set up a bloodstone circle in the back of the room at some point, soon after they’d first settled in, and its wards were so strong that the entrance to the room shimmered in the light.

Maria was already waiting, the messenger hovering by her side. Good. He’d been quick, or Maria had been close to begin with. “What’s wrong?”

“Messenger? Tell us everything.” the general prompted.  
“Um, my name is Bayani?” the boy stammered. He straightened at her glare. “Sorry. Steve Carlsberg’s gone missing.” His hands wrung nervously into the bottom of his shirt. “He, he was supposed to check in with the rest of the PTA four hours ago, and he hasn’t. He was picking up food for us at a dead drop outside of town, but the food is gone and there are signs of a struggle. The rest of the crew that was supposed to pick up the food afterward is missing too—just disappeared, as if they never existed. That’s all I know.”

Maria’s face was pale. “Janice?”  
“I haven’t told her,” Bayani’s eyes flicked from one face to the other. “I haven’t told anyone, the only other Extended Book Club member who knows is Ella, and she’s been keeping it secret too. The PTA all probably knows by now, though. It won’t be secret for long.”  
Maria hissed out an oath. “Tamika, why isn’t Janice here? Carlsberg is her _dad_, she deserves to know what’s going on! Besides, she’s the best tactician here. You can’t plan a major rescue like this without her!”

“I know.” Tamika inhaled. Exhaled.  
The knot in her intestines did not go away. “I know.”  
Why was she this worried? It was stupid of her, honestly, I mean Janice would get over it, right? Carlsberg was just another person. Losing him for good would be inconvenient, but not, not world-ending. Like breaking a particularly helpful coffee machine, if a coffee machine could reflect on her leadership choices and make her rage over having to lose anyone at all, over all the people Strex had _stolen_. Obviously _Janice _might care, for, for whatever reason normal people managed to love and hate and care and all of that. But—well, it would get better eventually.  
Right?

Maria would probably disagree.  
“I…” Tamika took a moment to decide how to put this. “Maria, I don’t think we should tell her. Not yet.”

The other girl went silent.

“Bayani, I’ll call you back in if I need you. Go inform your friend to keep it quiet, and then go do whatever it is you do back here.” The messenger left, plainly uncomfortable with the discussion going on. She might need to have someone talk to him, make sure he was alright, or as right as anyone could be in this apocalypse. In the meantime, Tamika dragged her eyes up to face her officer.  
“Maria. Janice is going to be upset about this either way. Hopefully Carlsberg will be, will be—” Not dead, that would never go over well, “will just be missing, and not in Strexcorp custody. But if he is, I can tell you personally, there is no information that he will manage to hold back. We _cannot_ afford to tell Strex everything he knows.”

Brown eyes stared straight back at her. After a long moment, Maria looked away. “You managed well enough,” she whispered.

“Yes, well.” Tamika tilted her head. “They use fear, you know, to make their victims talk. Drugs. It’s mostly drugs, that make you fear them and make you compliant, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them once they have you. I do not know fear, but Carlsberg doesn’t have that luxury. Steve knows _so much, _Maria, so much about our operations and the PTA’s both. If Strex learns about it—”

“But what if they don’t?!” Maria burst out. Her fingernails dug into pale brown skin, right above where her estrogen patch rested. “What if Carlsberg _can _resist it, what if they don’t know who they have?” Her fingers swept away at last, landing on the table with an audible smack. “Don’t you at least care about Janice?!”

When Tamika spoke again, her words were quiet. Fiery.  
“I care about _every_ life stolen from this town, under my guard. Stolen from _my _town. Especially Janice—but I don’t know that we can take that chance.”

A pause.  
Tamika did not relent, but her demeanor softened. “We’ll take him back if we get the opportunity, and if you have a better plan… I just don’t see what it could be. We cannot afford to risk trying to track him down and break him out, not if he’s in Desert Bluffs, where he will be thoroughly guarded and surveilled. If he isn’t, we can try, but Maria—” Her hands clenched on the table, her nails so tight against her skin that she was sure she had drawn blood. “you have to be prepared. Everyone who goes on this mission has to be prepared.”

“To _murder_ Steve Carlsberg.”  
“For the sake of all of us.”

There was a long moment of silence, Maria’s eyes locked grimly on her own.  
Until finally,

“Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Detailed CWs: No character deaths or forced drug use actually happens, but assassination is discussed as an option by the protagonists to keep interrogation from happening. I promise there will be a happy ending.


	11. Missing You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what, I was not expecting to spend the whole chapter with Janice Carlsberg, but... here I am! And here you are. With me, reading this. Thank you for that! 
> 
> Chapter CWs: blood magic, I guess? Nothing else.

Janice Carlsberg jolted awake.

“Dad?” she whispered. “Dad, where are you?”  
Some awful feeling was stirring in her fingers, in her toes. Something wasn’t right.  
Hands trembling, Janice levered herself into a sitting position and teetered to her feet. She winced at the static in her nerves, the sparks of pain running up her legs. It took agonizing seconds to throw a shirt on, a few more to perch on the edge of her cot long enough to change into a clean pair of pants. _Skirts may be easier, _she thought, _but at least nothing can crawl up the bottom of my pants. _

She shoved her feet into her pair of boots, and her pant cuffs followed. Janice stood up again, and now her shaking fingers gripped her girl scout vest neatly folded on the dresser, tan and dirty and stained with old blood.  
She slipped it on.

Better.

Janice took a deep breath, and let it out.  
The vest always made her feel calmer, a uniform with rules to follow. She sat down in her newly-rebuilt electric wheelchair and whirred out the door.

Should she ask Tamika?

_No, _some instinct whispered. _No, wait before you tell her. Besides, what would she do with nothing but a vague unease? _

So instead, Janice paused to think. It was just as well she got her own cot in her own room, thanks to the unreliable state of her legs. No-one had to see her leave.  
If she wasn’t going to go to Tamika, then who? Her seers, maybe, under her own direct command—but then, one of them might go to Tamika, or might spread whatever news they found too far.  
Carlos?  
Janice straightened. No, Cecil! Uncle Cecil was back, she could go to him! And assuming Dad was still in Night Vale, Cecil would be bound to know where and what state he was in. Carlos would probably be there anyway as well, for whatever good that did.

There was a new determination in her movement when Janice made her way on down the hall.

Soon Janice found herself in front of a doorway, near Carlos’s room. She wasn’t _exactly _sure where Cecil was sleeping, but he certainly wasn’t with her and all the kids. And given the way he’d always tended to start crooning strange chants and manifesting tentacles in his sleep, he wouldn’t be with the interlopers either.  
Besides, she could hear breathing in this one.  
Cautious, Janice peeked one hand inside. Nothing. No magical protections seared the flesh from her bones, or even made her skin itch. She peered around the doorframe—

“You may as well come in.”  
Janice jumped when a hoarse voice split the silence.

There weren’t many people awake in the wee hours of the morning like this, even here in the largest Book Club base. She slid slowly inside. “…Uncle Cecil?” Janice worried at her ear as she spoke. “What are you doing?”  
Cecil was bent over a plastic table in the corner, his fingers skimming over something in braille she couldn’t read in this darkness. The wall across from him emitted a faint light, just enough to turn him into a mere silhouette backlit against it.

He took a long while to answer.  
“I don’t… know, exactly. I’m certainly making a mess of this rough draft.” Cecil’s breath hissed out in an irritable puff. “Trying not to sleep, I guess?”

Janice would have laughed, if her heart weren't pounding anxious in her chest. That certainly sounded like him. Even if the voice was still jarringly unfamiliar- but she would get used to the voice, eventually. Janice rolled inside, tucking her bangs out of the way as she did. “It’s okay,” she mustered up a smile. “I get it. You can always fix the draft later.”  
A thought struck her.  
“Do you… mind me calling you Uncle Cecil? I know the interlopers all call you John, I can do the same if you’d rather.” Carlos had been quick to mention how different he seemed, now, from time to time. It was probably worth checking, even if Janice didn’t know that she’d be able to convince her mouth to do that anytime soon.

“From you?” Cecil hesitated. “I don’t mind, either one. I don’t really know that, either, I suppose. Who I am. But I like being your uncle, both versions of me are agreed on that.” He finally turned to face her general direction, though his eyes, as usual, were focused just a bit to the left of where they should be. “Are you okay?”

It was Janice’s turn to hesitate. But after a long moment, she answered.  
“I think so. But I woke up with, with a vaguely ominous feeling about dad. I know you and my dad haven’t always gotten along very well, but could you… see if you can find him? I don’t know. I feel like something’s wrong, something to do with him, and I’m… worried. He’s supposed to be distributing food provisions between the Strike Camps today. Maybe something happened.”

“Maybe he just got lost.”

Beams, it was strange how reassuring Uncle Cecil sounded despite the utterly unconvinced tone of voice, and the weirdness of how his voice had changed. Janice smiled for real when he reached hesitantly over and took her hand.  
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.  
“You remember how to scry, right?”  
Carlos had mentioned that Cecil didn’t remember everything he once had, even though he was apparently _much_ better than he had been when the interlopers first found him. No matter. Janice may not be great at scrying, but she could certainly walk him through the process if he needed.  
“I think so?” Cecil’s hand was cold in hers. “At least enough to get _them _to take over. Station Management.”

“Well it might help you sleep, too, eventually.” Janice drew away, her eyes sweeping over the smooth walls. Nothing helpful there. “We need a bowl or something, that always worked best for you before. And a fresh egg.”  
“I don’t know that we’ll be able to find an egg,” Cecil murmured, but soon enough he found a bright purple camp mug, thin plastic stained with coffee grounds, pulled from a box under the table. “Will this do for a bowl?”

“Good enough,” Janice nodded. “We can use some blood instead, eggs are just healthier in the long run than giving blood for every little spell. The point is giving part of a life to it—it’s meant to be a power source, after all. How about my blood, since I’m more related to Steve?”  
“To focus the spell?”  
“Exactly. It’s not like I’ve got his hair or something on hand.” She probably should, that would have saved her a lot of trouble. Even _she_ could usually scry someone on command with that kind of focus to direct it. “We can make do.”

Janice planted her uncle’s hands firmly on each side of the mug, and went to the water bottle hanging from her chair. “Here,” she poured about half a mug of water into the bottom, and switched out the bottle for her pocket knife. “You’ll need to take the blood. A few drops should do it.”  
Cecil gulped. “Are you sure about this?” Ginger fingers wrapped around the handle of the knife. “I don’t want to hurt you.”  
“Don’t worry about it,” she soothed.  
“If you say so.”

With a last anxious glance, Cecil made a tiny, half-inch slit in her palm, waiting as the drops sent ripples through the no longer clean water. His head bent over the mug, his legs sank slowly to the floor. A moment later, the third eye on his forehead blinked blearily open.

“Oh.”  
Breathless.

Janice leaned forward, pressing her bloody hand to her pants to staunch the bleeding. Apparently this was close enough. Cecil was surrounded by the faint glow he always seemed to get during his visions, a tooth-rattling hum starting to emanate from his body. Janice ignored it. Cecil wouldn’t hurt her. After the first minute, Janice leaned back into her chair with a sigh. She forgot how long this took, sometimes.

Until finally, Cecil woke.

“Ah!” his eyes snapped up. “Janice! He’s, he’s, he’s—” Cecil’s breathing was uncomfortably fast. His chest heaved, his throat clenched, his fingers scrabbled for purchase on the ground. The mug fell unceremoniously to the floor, and he reached up to her with frantic motion.  
“Easy!” Janice took his trembling hands in her own. Dutifully she helped her uncle up, though it killed her to wait even another second for a description. “Easy. What did you see?”  
Cecil’s eyes were wide. The last time she’d seen such panic in them had been years ago, when Cecil first learned that Carlos had been captured—oh beams, Janice’s muscles went wire-tense, oh beams. What _happened? _

“Strex has him.”

The announcement felt like a punch to the gut.  
A second later, there were arms around her, cold, comforting arms marked with shifting black spirals. Cecil, though he shook even as he held her. Was that moisture on his face, under his blind eyes? Didn’t he always seem to _hate _Steve? Every inch of him radiated nothing but terror, now, nothing but honest terror and grief.  
“I’m so sorry, Janice,” Cecil whispered. “Strex has him.”

Janice didn’t feel the wetness on her own cheeks, only the pressure where she hugged her uncle.

_We have to get him back._

A wet breath puffed from her lips. It took a moment to force her mouth back into a shape willing to speak, but she did it, a quiet plea by her uncle’s ear.   
“Help me save him.”

The eldritch hum was back by the time Cecil answered, his voice more growl than words.

“Always.”  
  


~~~

Tamika Flynn was nowhere to be found.

This did not sit easy with Janice, though it was not entirely unexpected. Something told her Tamika already knew. But if she already knew, and hadn’t seen fit to tell Janice what she was up to…  
She swallowed. Either Tamika was busy, or Tamika was doing something which she knew would not go over well. Which meant—what did it mean? That it was already taken care of?

No.  
Really, more likely that meant that she’d have to take care of it on her own, if she wanted to make sure she could live with the outcome.   
Janice sighed, more out of stress than sadness. On the one hand, this would be _so much easier _if she could coordinate with the general! Confront her, figure out what she was planning, _something._ But Tamika had good enough wards, by now, even Cecil wouldn’t be able to scry her very easily, and what if she was doing something Janice really _shouldn’t_ know about? No. If Tamika wanted to show up, she would. Instead, Janice slipped into the tactics room, the lock opening easily to her magic.

Where was Tamika?

It only took a moment for Janice to figure it out.

There.  
Tamika, and Maria, and two _entire sniper squads _had been sent to the Secret Police Warehouse outside of town. And a PTA marker, judgemental gaze and all. _Damnit! _

Janice carefully did not punch the side of her chair.  
Tamika was there, and a PTA member was there, for no apparent reason. It had to be Steve! Why else would PTA members be meeting there? Why else would the Book Club know about it? It had to be a ransom attempt. And Tamika hadn’t told her, so—  
Janice forced herself to breathe as normally as she could, counting off the seconds like in meditation. She had to keep her cool. She had to _think._ Hopefully they were going to try and rescue him, right? Not… anything else? Even though nobody had asked her for ideas, despite being main tactical leader of the Extended Book Club? And, and she was freaking out over nothing, they just didn't want to worry her.

Janice Carlsberg tried to calm down.   
But that awful feeling was still there, and there was clearly something wrong. It took bare seconds to memorize the layout of the strategy table, and then she was gone.

~~~

“Uncle Cecil?” her voice was cold. It was the first thing she'd said when she wheeled back into the room, her free hand clenched against the armrest. “They’re gone. We’re not getting any help from Tamika on the rescue. Or if we are, we can’t count on it.”

“You’re sure about all this?”   
It was Carlos who seemed most trepidatious, and his voice was laced with disbelief. But the scientist was trusting at heart. Janice knew he would agree to anything that Cecil insisted on, and Cecil was _definitely_ insisting on this.

“Absolutely,” she lied.“Tamika went off on this mission _herself, _with only a couple of very skilled squads, including one of sniper specialists—and furthermore, she didn’t _tell me. _She tells me everything!” She had to be wrong about this, right? She certainly hoped so. Tamika just… hadn’t thought about calling her, and everything would be fine. Janice wrenched herself back to the present.   
“I can’t do this on my own. Cecil, do you know _where_ they have him? Or how?”  
Cecil sighed. “They brought him to the warehouse, I think. Somewhere dark, with lots of boxes. They’re keeping him sedated.”

“But my dad is in Night Vale?”  
“He is.” The Voice of Night Vale frowned. “But he is heavily guarded, very heavily guarded. I don’t know that they intend on actually releasing him, if it is a ransom plot or a prisoner trade. And I don’t think we have any real chance of freeing him, not without an army at our backs, or a couple five-headed dragons. And Hiram McDaniels is not in town.”

No chance.  
Janice bit her lip until the tears in her eyes stopped threatening to fall. Her glare could've bored a hole in the wall opposite her. “We can try,” she managed at last. “Right?”  
_No._

Cecil knew what he was talking about.  
If her dad was really that well-guarded, she knew perfectly well that going after him directly would be a bad idea—what would Tamika Flynn do instead, if she were here? She took another deep breath, paused, and released it. The rhythm helped her think.

The two adults still watched her intently, as if they had every faith in Janice’s skills. The realization filled her with hope. “I’m being silly,” she murmured. “If they’re guarding my dad, that means there’s something else that’s less thoroughly watched than usual. Where will that be?”  
Carlos shrugged. “Probably somewhere back in Desert Bluffs, that they don’t feel like they need to guard.”  
Cecil pursed his lips a moment. “I believe I recall something about there being a few more convoys than usual this morning, coming from Desert Bluffs.” A shrug. “I may be mistaken, of course. Wishful thinking.”

“Somewhere in Desert Bluffs.” Janice’s stomach churned. “There’s no way we can attack Desert Bluffs, is there?”  
When no-one answered, an idea trickled in.  
“But then again,” the words came slowly, “we don’t have to actually do a lot of damage, do we?” Janice realized. “We just have to do _enough _that the team holding my dad hears about it and runs back home before they do whatever it is they’re gonna do. Right? Right,” she told herself. “It just has to be showy, a big, visible attack to make them panic. They’ll be _expecting_ an attack on whatever team has dad, I mean we’ve spent enough time rescuing captives from them, they must have figured that out by now. And besides, even if, if the worst happens with my dad—” Oh beams, she desperately didn’t want to think about that. “Even if he… you know, even then, maybe we can make Steve Carlsberg’s life a trade they’ll regret.”

She swallowed. “And hopefully Tamika’s group will save him, and it won’t come to that.”

_What would Tamika think, when she got back? Would she be offended, by Janice’s lack of trust? Pleased with her competence? Angry?_  
Janice shoved those doubts to the back of her mind with a growl. Now was _not the time_ to dither over what Tamika thought, no matter how amazing the general was. No matter how much it bothered her to hide like this from her own best friend.

Now she just had to see what forces she could find for the journey.


	12. This Day Shall Never Return

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter CWs needed this time :3  
  
We're getting into the final conflict at long last, and I'm just really proud I got this far, and amazed by what I've made-- so thanks for reading, from the bottom of my heart! Writing this would be a hell of a lot harder without feedback. <3

It had been Cecil’s idea.

The Extended Book Club, of course, would have followed Tamika wherever she led. Even if they wouldn’t, Janice had no interest in dividing the Readers, and bringing Book Club members along to possibly go against Tamika’s plans would be guaranteed to do exactly that. It would have been strategically terrible, in the long run.  
But she couldn’t do this alone.  
And while the interlopers might be _willing _to help her, Janice couldn’t stand the thought of trading her father’s revenge for Cecil’s life. Or his soul, or his bodily autonomy, or whatever it was that Strex would do to him if they got a hold on an interloper’s soul. Janice had been just about ready to give in try this on her own when Cecil had an idea: Ask the people in the Desert Otherworld. Half of Night Vale was there, after all. They would be safe to bring into the fight, and Strex doubly wouldn’t be expecting them.

Apparently, whatever force had aligned Night Vale and the Desert Otherworld in time and space agreed.

“Well it seems we’re in luck,” Dana’s voice echoed through the speakers. Thank the beams that she had been near the Desert Otherworld’s radio setup at the time, because otherwise, Janice would have been _screwed_. “I asked Kaphr of the Masked Army about Desert Bluffs, and ze claims that there is a doorway to its center within this very fortress, that has simply been kept sealed all this time. If you can sneak inside and reopen the door, Kaphr would be glad to lead zer army against Desert Bluffs, even if all they can manage to do is cause a little chaos.” A smile wafted through her voice. “The Masked Army has been waiting a very long time to reach their god again, ze tells me.”  
“_Their _god?” Cecil’s voice was cool. “How can we be sure they will not follow the Smiling God, once they have reached our universe safely?”

“Because,” Dana murmured into a microphone on her end, “their task is one of containment, and healing, not of servitude. Apparently this fortress on the mountain used to be theirs. I suppose that explains the hundred foot tall doorways,” she rambled. “So Kaphr and zer Masked Army will meet you there. When you reach the door, I recommend that you kneel and pray, and so you will be shown the way.” A sigh. “I wish you all the best, Cecil. May the Smiling God’s devotions turn to ashes and ink in its mouth. I hope we will not have to fight—but we must be prepared for war.”

~~~

She should have asked Janice.

Tamika gave the warehouse a dubious look. This could not possibly end well, and she should have asked Janice for help, Janice would know what to do. Janice always had ideas, and then she wouldn’t be stuck here, walking into the most obvious trap since the Summer Reading Program.

It was the ransom notes which tipped her off.  
Also the ransom notes which irritated her to no end, because apparently Strexcorp _still _didn’t consider her a competent, fully intelligent enemy! The trap was obvious! By about the time that Tamika, Maria, and their team were ready to leave, they got news that Strex had started dropping flyers all over town, advertising their capture of Steve Carlsberg. A quick scry had revealed that he was being kept in the Secret Police warehouse outside of town, and then they’d snuck directly here.  
There had to be dozens of guards.

But they couldn’t just back down now, could they? Either way, they’d have to either deal with Carlsberg or unravel just about everything about how the Book Club worked, and where they were based, because Carlsberg couldn’t keep his beams-forsaken mouth shut. Damnit! And of course, Strex knew this, Strex had the advantage and knew they’d have to come out and figure something out for Carlsberg.

No matter how this ended, Strex would win.

Kira gave her a thumbs up. The girl lay flat on the ground with a sniper rifle and a sighted, spring-powered compound bow in case someone saw her and jammed the gun with magic before she could shoot. Bayani knelt next to her with a knife and another bow, as a guard. Bows were even easier to get a hold of than guns, and didn’t need half as much maintenance, as well as being invulnerable to jamming, so they had long been a Book Club favorite. Tamika gave them an uneasy nod, before turning back to Maria.

“You take the far side,” she signed. “Set up the other sniper team, send me a ping when you’re ready.” Tamika took a moment to flick her eyes over the warehouse. “And wish me luck.”

Dawn was spreading across the horizon.

She’d tried to make sure they were done before sunrise, or could wait until dusk, when the powers of the Smiling God were weaker. But today? Even a day in Strexcorp’s tender care would be too much, would leave the Book Club exposed and vulnerable. It would be too late, if they waited for nightfall. So instead here she lurked, hoping the shadows would be enough to keep them all hidden.

All she had to do was get Carlsberg within sight of a window.

The snipers could take over after that.  
And if she got caught again, or killed—Tamika couldn’t help the shudder that overcame her. If she got caught, then Janice would take over when she didn’t make it back, and the resistance would continue. The interlopers would help. Night Vale would be, _had_ to be recaptured. Her efforts would not be in vain. Even if she died doing something as patently _stupid _as purposefully drawing the attention of a couple dozen Strex goons.

Tamika scowled.  
How to play this? When she had been captured, Strexcorp underestimated her by quite a lot. Would they underestimate her again? Or would it be better to present herself as strong, an equal leader coming to make a trade? _Probably not, _she thought_, I mean they certainly hadn’t been shy about the bait for this little trap._ Could she pull off pretending to be someone else entirely? Was it worth the risk?  
Hell, maybe she wouldn’t have to show herself at all. Maybe they could just make a few noises, and the goons would wander off, and Steve would end up in sight of the snipers. She may as well try that first, if nothing else.

Slowly, Tamika inched forward. She’d arranged herself to be closer to the door than to the sides of the building, tucked away behind a couple of empty and disassembled cardboard boxes that teetered in the wind.  
She tugged a rock from the ground. Waited until the guards weren’t looking, tossed it toward the door, and turtled down behind her flimsy shelter.

“What was that?!” A voice she recognized as some Secret Police Officer, non-Strex.

“Finally!” _That _was a familiar voice, one that still made Tamika twitch. Lauren Mallard. “I was starting to get tired of waiting. Don’t worry, dear, I know exactly who this is. Everything is going to be perfectly alright now!” There was a pause. “Find them.”

Tamika stifled a sigh.  
Of _course _they knew. Of course. Nothing could ever be easy where Strexcorp was concerned. She began to wiggle gradually back out to the safety of the cliffs—

What the hell was that?  
A small, pulsating lump of grey fur sat twitching on the ground.

Tamika froze.

After a moment, she began to inch forward again, but then—it had eyes. Huge, gentle, _empty_ duck eyes. The thing lurched forward on its stumpy legs, squeaking adorably in a way that sent the klaxons clanging in her head.

She stumbled back. Something about this thing, something about it seemed familiar, and not in a good way. It lurched forward again, and Tamika hurried out of the way, just in time to trip on another of the things.

Fuck.

This time, when the lump of fur surged toward her, Tamika was too off-balance to dodge it, and it seized her leg. Bit down, leaving blood to pour from her ankle to the ground. Tamika clenched her jaw.  
_No sound. Make no sound, and maybe they won’t notice._

She needn’t have bothered.

The clack of high heels on pavement signaled the arrival of a Strex employee. “Hello dear,” cooed Lauren Mallard as Tamika snatched her hand away from the second StrexPet. “I’m so very glad to see you again!”

Too late.

Tamika steeled herself for the worst.

~~~

Janice shifted in her wheelchair.

She had managed to commandeer one of the yellow helicopters they’d reclaimed during the last rescue mission, but it still felt like the whole _world_ would come and go by the time she reached Desert Bluffs. This was taking too long, way too long. She couldn’t stand it! But what else could she do? She had an earpiece tucked into her hair where no-one could easily spot it, picking up Cecil’s radio signal on the other side. And with couple of friends to help smuggle her in, and hopefully out as well, this was about as good as she was ever gonna get. But… Janice couldn’t help the feeling that she would already be too late by the time she got there.  
Something was wrong.  
But she’d felt uneasy since the moment she woke up in the wee hours of the morning, and there was nothing specific, so if there was anything she could do, she had to be already doing it! Right?

“Five minutes.”  
Ashley’s voice was quiet in her earpiece above the roar of the helicopter.

One of the oldest members of the extended Book Club, Ashley was tall and big-boned, and her clothes were stained with blood, to blend in better with Strex. The badge on her official-looking shirt was stolen from a helicopter pilot kidnapped with the helicopter, one who at least looked vaguely similar to Ashley, and all she had to do to pass as a man was tuck her hair under her hat. “You’d better get set up for infiltration.”

To actually get inside, Janice had decided to borrow a page from her leader.

Tamika had snuck out of Desert Bluffs by hiding inside a container. Given that there had been no particular change in how often the containers seemed to be searched, or how soon after delivery they were typically unpacked, it seemed to still be a viable strategy. And besides, it wasn’t like she had any better ideas. The Door which Kaphr of the Masked Army had suggested was smack in the middle of Strex headquarters, and a wheelchair there would stick out like a bluebird among crows.

“Acknowledged,” she said. Whatever else could be said for these things, they were far from comfortable. As it was, Janice sat tucked behind two layers of cardboard boxes filled with nothing but stones. Another cardboard box, lined with more rocks and sand from the canyon but mostly empty, sat upside down over Janice and her chair, concealing them from view. It would be easy enough to break through, when they arrived, and she could stand on her own long enough to slip through to the door of the container. Now she just had to be… quiet. She took the opportunity, though, to cut the top of her arm with her pocket knife and paint a careful sigil with the blood, a basic notice-me-not enchantment. It took more blood than she would like, to make it strong enough for her mission, but when it was done she was still only slightly woozy.

“KH83, standing by to land.”  
Ashley’s voice was sunny and professional, if a little tight over that lingering note of terror. She had done this before.  
“Yes, sir! Mr. Boring told me to haul this over, he said those sillies over in N—in the Desert Bluffs Greater Metropolitan Area had hidden one of the containers of highly dangerous rocks, and it needed to be confiscated for their own good.” There was a murmur of voices on the other side. Perfectly understandable, since “Eric Boring” had been killed during the distraction the Readers had run while the interlopers were transported back to base. Maybe he hadn’t been reported dead yet?

“What!” Ashley was good at feigning shock, she really was. “Dead?! I had no idea! I must have gotten held up trying to leave that sinkhole. Truly an awful place,” she sighed. “but we can only do so much to fix its troubles.” A pause. “Landing pad 12, yes, understood. I’m glad we managed to work this out! Workplace harmony really is important.”

Soon enough, there was a bump as the container touched ground. 

Janice let out a calming breath.  
It was now or never.

A spear of light twinkled through one corner of the box as the door creaked open.  
“You’re getting searched,” Ashley hissed. “Stay calm, it should just be superficial.”

Sure enough, a moment later the light went out, and Janice was left in darkness again.

“Thanks again, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.”  
Ashley’s smile was audible even through the tinny sound of Janice’s headset. “I’ve got to stick around long enough to refuel, but—” Someone must have cut her off. “Oh, no, really I already have a job after this—” There was another pause before Ashley replied, returned to her somewhat strained cheer. “Yes sir. I understand.”

Agonizing minutes later, Ashley finally whispered something else of relevance.

“Someone should come collect your container in the next ten minutes, put it in the warehouse. It’s a pretty short walk, there’s a dumbwaiter waiting and everything, they fixed it just last week, and then you’ll be as close as I can get you. Are you all good on your end?”

“All clear here.” Janice murmured. “Think you can get me out of the warehouse without raising the alarm?”  
The pilot’s tone was apologetic. “I don’t want to risk using my keycard. Someone might have updated it, I mean my disguise is probably confirmed as dead by now. Sorry.”

“I’ll manage. Don’t worry about it.” Janice wished she’d given herself the same advice. Sitting here, fidgeting with her wheels, she was doing nothing but worrying. She hated it.

Eventually, the container stopped moving.

She could hear voices outside, chattering away, fading as they wandered off. How long would she have before someone came back in to deliver something else?  
Janice let out a breath.  
Time to go.

Careful fingers traced the box around her until they found the seam. There. That would be the front. One hand grabbed her pocket knife from her belt, the other split the tape holding the box shut down the middle, and Janice peered out.  
Nothing.

Of course, the container was still closed, so it wasn’t like she would be getting a lot of light. Nonetheless, Janice heaved herself to her feet. A groan, kept as quiet as she could. She should have stretched more, should have kept her legs limber, but there wasn’t room in the box for that kind of movement. Oh, well. She’d have to cope.

The boxes in front of her proved sturdy enough to lean on. She edged them sideways as best she could and eased between, thankful for the extra support. Eventually her hand brushed something metal. _Gotcha. _Gently, Janice eased her hand down, down and across until it reached the middle of the seam, dim light peeking through the edge. There wasn’t quite enough of a gap to slot her fingers through, but there was certainly enough for—

“Janice.” Uncle Cecil’s voice crackled through the earpiece, anxious like a man on a burning bridge was anxious, scared like he stood face-to-face with the Smiling God itself. “Janice, I had a vision.” His breathing blew static across the microphone, short and heavy from exertion, or maybe panic. _Definitely _panic.

“Tamika’s been caught.”


	13. Not The Same as Never Leaving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! :)  
Welcome to the beginning of the end! Also a little personal discovery for one of our beloved interlopers.
> 
> Chapter CWs: blood magic, Strexcorp being ableist af, some non-graphic death-- details in the end notes, if you'd like

“Tamika’s been caught.”

A feather could have dropped in the broadcasting room, and every soul there with working ears would have heard it hit the ground.  
By now there was quite a crowd—all four of the interlopers, as well as Carlos, and a handful of other Book Club members who had seen Cecil sprawl to the ground in the hallway, lost in a vision. Or who watched him run stumbling through the corridor and into the broadcast room, banging into walls as he passed. Who let him flip switches in a groggy haze, refusing to speak to anyone until those awful words tumbled from his lips. 

“They have her," he repeated. "Please, Janice—” Another switch flipped, and he was broadcasting to the world. “Night Vale.” The faint glow strengthened in Cecil’s presence, and his voice slid from hoarse to velvet again. “Please. I do not know for how long I will be able to make myself heard to all of you before this channel is retaken, but please. Listen.”  
The interlopers started, at the back of the room. “How the _hell?” _the scientist among them whispered, “the radio _outside_ just turned on, how does that even work?!”  
_“Quiet,” _someone hissed.

“Tamika Flynn, who was never lost, has once again been found,” Cecil intoned. “Found, by those who have no business finding her. It is with a heavy heart, Night Vale, that I make this proclamation as Tamika bid me in her prayer: Now is the time.” He paused, and the quiet then was absolute. “You all know Tamika Flynn. She is the Beating Heart, the Lungs that Breathe, and she needs your help. _Night Vale_ needs your help. So to all who listen to me now, whether in town or elsewhere, hidden or in plain sight, _please_. The time is now. I am the Voice of Night Vale,” a proclamation, marked with the soft hush of static that followed him everywhere, the shifting of markings on his skin, “and you are not alone. The time is now.” He took another breather. His head tilted in thought, the eye on his forehead peeking open. “You will know your friends when you see them. You will find us, if you look. And we will find you.” Something about the statement sent chills down the listener’s spines. “Mayor Winchell may be gone,” his voice whispered, “but there is power in Night Vale yet. The time is now.”

A button pressed, and the recording light flickered off, the third eye closed.  
“Agent Coulson?” Cecil’s voice was calm, but his hands shook like a pair of squirrels on crack. “There will be no other time. You and your interlopers will be needed in the upcoming fight.” He swallowed. “If we do not win now, we will not get the chance again.”

“You’re… sure?” Coulson sounded dubious, his eyes locked on those trembling hands. “You heard what Erika said. Are you—”  
“I’m sure!” Cecil snapped, and the tattoos twitched on his neck as he whipped around to face the government agent. He gripped the desk, white-knuckled, and poured every drop of conviction he had into his voice. “I am sure. There will be no other chance, for us, or for our town. I know it. The time is now.”  
“If any of us get caught—”

“I know!” he burst out. There were tears in his eyes. “I know. If any of you get caught, my entire self will be forfeit and the Smiling God will have me. Agent Coulson, _please _don’t make me ask you again.” His face turned. “Agent Romanov?”  
Was that a plea? Whatever it was, Natasha picked up on it. “Alright,” she nodded. Her face was a mix of pity and strength, and something else that Cecil could not quite determine. “We’ll go. Where do you want us?”

Cecil let out a shaky breath.

He pressed a couple of keys, and some of the lights turned back on. “Janice?” he murmured. “Maria’s out with Tamika, I don’t have contact with her. You’re the deputy leader. This is the final effort. Have you got a, a plan, or something? Any ideas?”

* * *

When Janice spoke, her voice was hushed and tense.  
“I… yes. Ideas. Get in touch with Abdul, he’s the other Commander. He can run you through the basics of the plan—” there was no sound for a moment but the sound of breathing, the faint creak and clicking of a wheelchair, until it was replaced by something like boxes scraping on metal, then a thump as they landed on the warehouse floor.  
Janice heaved out a breath. “Okay. Some things will have to be changed,” she whispered, “since so many of us are already out on missions. On the one hand, we should focus on getting Tamika and my dad out alive, but—well, that’s exactly where they’re expecting an attack, isn’t it? Like with my dad.”

The ideas were flowing, now, even as Janice snuck through the Strex headquarters, having shoved the extra boxes out of the way with her chair. She really did love the motor on this thing. Even with all that extra weight to move out of the way, it didn’t take long for her to slip into the dumbwaiter and start heading down. Hopefully, no-one would be waiting for her when she got to the right floor. If they were, her camouflage spell could never be enough.  
“Go for Strex headquarters at City Hall. They know we can’t afford to aim for much that won’t win us resources anymore, they won’t be expecting it. But we don’t need resources if this is the last ditch effort.” Jancie bit her lip. “Hit fast, hit hard, and leave. Sabotage their helicopters. Guerilla warfare, just like Emily Dickinson. We can’t afford a straight fight.” She let out a brief chuckle, though she sobered almost immediately. “Abdul knows that, obviously. But be extra careful. We’re working with our hands tied here, at least until news of the interlopers get out. Give me a minute.”

The dumbwaiter stopped. No-one to be seen.  
Carefully, Janice wheeled her way over a bump, her chair barely even having to work for it. She peeked out of the empty warehouse and into the hall—

Two yellow-blazoned, bloodstained humans stood at the end, by the door. They were Strex employees, they had to be. Janice whispered a quick incantation before they got the chance to notice her, her knife in hand and ready before her arm. She would only have a moment. This spell needed eye contact to work, and flesh on both ends to rip into, but at least it was quiet. _Not to mention deadly.  
_One of the Strex employees glanced up, and their eyes met. They started to say something—but Janice cast her spell and slit the knife across her own arm. The first employee toppled over. With a quick repeat of the same gesture and muttered incantation, the second employee fell to the ground as well, their throat cut.

“Okay,” she murmured.

A brief glance at a fire escape map made Janice’s decision for her. She wouldn’t have long before someone else came down the hallway. Fortunately, she didn’t actually need much time. The office room only another two doors down had a second exit, onto the same corridor as the room where the portal must be. Good enough. With only a twinge of guilt, Janice left the bodies where they lay.

She hurried, instead, to the next room on her route, wrapping her bleeding arm in a bandage from her bag as she did. She couldn’t afford much more of this. She only had so much blood to lose.  
Thankfully the camouflage spell should be enough to keep her hidden, so long as no-one looked at her for too long, and so long as she kept moving. Coming out of the dumbwaiter had been unusual enough to attract notice, but surely just rolling across the room would be alright. She hoped. Right? At least the bloodstains from all her spellcasting wouldn’t be particularly out of place here, even if her wheelchair was.  
“Uncle Cecil?” she whispered. “You know what the interloper’s abilities are. Explain it to me?”

Cecil must be speaking into a phone, now, because the sound quality had gone way down. “Right.” He was still clearly agitated. “Agent Coulson?”

A man cleared his throat somewhere nearby. “I am a former scout, myself, not to mention a local. My exact abilities are classified, but my occupation should give you a pretty good guess. Stark is primarily an inventor, but he has a very helpful electronic suit, equipped with a number of missile weapons which do not exactly qualify as guns. It can also fly.” He paused. “Agent Romanov is much like myself. She is excellent in hand-to-hand and short-range combat, though her specialty lies elsewhere. Dr. Banner is a scientist, of course, but also a, uh…”  
Cecil jumped in. “He changes form! He turns into a great green giant, albeit one with a bit of a temper. Very strong, very sweet, though I fear he mostly comes out when the dear scientist is overstressed.”  
“He can transform at will,” Agent Coulson assured them both.

Hmm. Janice kept an eye out, though her plan to slip through the offices seemed to be going unnoticed thus far. She kept her face tilted down, hair dripping over her eyes. “Don’t send them out yet,” that was a start. “I want to know how well off the Masked Army will be over here before we distribute the interlopers.”  
And then a new voice interrupted, jarringly real and present instead of crackling through her earpiece. _Shit!_  
“Why hasn’t anyone fixed you yet?” it was a yellow-clad stranger, stopped dead in the hall. “Strex fixes everyone.”  
Janice froze. Pasted a haphazard smile on her face. “Uh… don’t worry?” she squeaked. “I’m on the list, it just, it’s just taking a while to get to me. But I can… be productive anyway?” Beams, she was _terrible _at improvising. Tactics, absolutely. But dialogue?  
The woman only looked concerned.

_Shit, shit, shit!_

She was attracting a bit of a crowd, now, of all the people that hadn’t noticed her wheelchair before it was pointed out. How the hell did Strexcorp just… not employ _anyone with a different body from the norm? _And why? Even if the differences were mostly helpful to productivity, like Michael Sandero’s second head! Or Renée’s extra pair of eyes! It was eerie, frankly, to look at, all those beige and brown bodies, each with the same number of features. Janice forced herself to take a deep breath. If this erupted into violence, there would be no getting out of it. Instead, she reinforced the plastic smile as best she could. “I’m sorry, I’d love to go in for repairs, you know, but I have a mission! Urgent, and directly from the other side.” If the “other side” meant the other side of the war, at least. “I have to get back to work!”

A clandestine press of a button, and her wheelchair kicked into gear. Janice’s progress forward was not precisely fast, but when she ran into some Strex drone at the end of the hall, the wheelchair just kept going. Inexorable, like it was still pushing a few boxes full of stone. Beams, she loved this mode. She may have added it last year for heavy lifting, but honestly? It was even better for running people over.  
“Hey! What are you—”  
Janice stopped. Her wheelchair, she knew, had just crunched its way onto the Strex drone’s left foot, and the employee had bent over to try and free themself. Instead of trying to escape, Janice grabbed the drone’s hair and tugged it toward her. Strex liked intimidation and casual violence, right? She’d give them intimidation. Janice pulled out her pocketknife again, tapping the drone on the nose with it.  
“Me?” she asked brightly. “I’m just trying to do my job!” The hand holding the Strex employee’s hair gave it a tug until they bent double, their ear right by Janice’s mouth, their cheek pressed to the flat of the blade. Janice’s next words were quiet. “Now get back to work.”

Nervous but undisturbed, Janice Carlsberg rolled on.

* * *

Natasha wasn’t sure why she was here.

John/Cecil and his crowd of people had all moved off to the tactics room, to figure out a plan of attack. Nat had tried to follow—but halfway through, had found herself… distracted.

It was the door.  
The old oak door, in the heart of this fortress, with static and whispers and shifting shapes of shadows all around it, that no-one else seemed willing to acknowledge. Or maybe they didn’t notice it? But then, it wasn’t the central door that called to her so much, though that was the one she had fixed. No, this door was off to the side, and it smelled like cold, and snow, and… home. What would happen if she opened it? How bad could it be?  
Nat took a careful step, and then another. Placed her palms on the door. It was cold, this door, so cold! One hand slipped down toward the handle, almost in a trance, until—

“You don’t want to do that.” Annabelle’s voice rang out.  
Nat looked up at the girl. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt her. Probably. Would it?

The scout didn’t bother waiting for a response. “Seriously. Unlike basically every other door in here, that one actually goes somewhere.”  
“How is that a problem?” she couldn’t think of anything else to say, clumsily signing alongside her words. “Isn’t it just a, a portal or something?” Really, she couldn’t seem to think of much at all. Ever since she’d woken up in that room full of angels, it was like her mind was stuffed with clouds, kinda like being on a full load of pain meds, except slightly more coherent.

“Or something,” the deaf girl agreed. “You know, I thought you seemed different from the other interlopers. And not just because you’re a lady. It calls you, doesn’t it?”  
Nat managed a nod. “It smells of home.”  
“To me, too.” Annabelle’s head tilted to one side. “It leads to Nulogorsk, Night Vale’s sister town in Russia.”

That cut through the fog, a bit. “Nothing-town?”  
“I was born there,” the girl continued placidly. “In 1971. That door showed up in our basement in 1983, and we fled through it when we heard the bomb was about to hit. When we came out on the other side, it turned out Janice had just fixed it a few days before, and the year was 2015. As far as anyone can tell, Nulogorsk is still stuck in 1983. I guess you’re probably a Nulogorsk local too.”  
Nat’s mouth opened. Closed. “You’re older than me?” That had to be bullshit. But… she didn’t sound like she was lying.

“The only Night Vale natives that have tried going inside anything from Nulogorsk since then suffered from spontaneous aging and died.” She gave a sad sort of shrug. “No going back, I suppose.”

It took a long moment before Nat could assemble her thoughts into some kind of order. “Then I can’t be from there, can I? I was born in 1984, and I don’t think it was in Nulogorsk anyway, I mean I’ve never heard of the place. I was born in Stalingrad.”  
The girl pursed her lips. “Who were your parents?” When Natasha didn’t answer, she continued. “Romanov… I remember a Dr. Romanov, but he was conscripted for the Blood-Space War right before his husband learned he was pregnant. Quite the drama at the time. I think the surviving husband ran away, between that and the whole nuclear scare. What were they going to name the kid, again? I think it started with an A?”

“Alianovna,” Nat’s voice was strangled. “Natalia Alianovna Romanov.”

Annabelle grinned.  
“Well then. Welcome to the closest place you’ll ever find to home, my fellow escapee. Welcome to Night Vale.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good luck, everybody! Thank you for reading my stuff!
> 
> Detailed CWs: Some unnamed Strex employees are killed in combat, and some other unnamed Strex employees assume that Janice is broken and in need of fixing despite her utter badassery.


	14. Real Gods Require Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait!   
I have about a million different things due this month, I'm not surprised I forgot to post last week. But anyway-- stay safe! 
> 
> No chapter CWs needed?

It took all of Tamika’s self-control to keep her face expressionless, her hands still.   
It was not fear. It was… panic? No. Worry? Concern? She didn’t want to be here. Her eyes had flickered up, once, to look at Steve Carlsberg where he sat woozy in plastic cuffs, a doped-up smile on his face. As disgusting as even looking at it made her feel, Tamika couldn’t find it in her to feel angry. Not at Carlsberg, in any case. Instead, she kept her glare carefully fixed on the floor, ready to ignite the first damned StrexPet to cross her path.

Maria and the others had to know, right? Had to know she’d been caught? She never should have run this, should have let them keep Carlsberg and cope with everything he revealed. But—that wouldn’t have worked out well, in the end, either. She’d made the right decision, trying to keep Carlsberg from spilling his secrets. And she couldn’t stand the thought of staying back at base, _hoping _the team she sent would manage it on their own, but—well, maybe it was reckless of her to try and distract them herself.   
Tamika bit her lip.   
And now Strex would wait here, ready to catch anyone else who walked into their bloody trap to free the captives. _Please, _she prayed. _Don’t come after me. Focus on Strex. I’ll manage. _

She contorted herself to wipe the wetness on her cheeks off on the scratchy fabric covering her shoulder. With her hands cuffed to the bottom of the radiator behind her, even something as simple as that was a pain. At least it distracted her from the way her very skin itched. She could barely even _flinch _if push came to shove—but every second she could get by without acknowledging the smug figure of Lauren Mallard above her was a blessed one.   
_Just tell Janice I’m sorry. _

All of a sudden, cackles rang out in the otherwise quiet warehouse.

_Carlsberg?_   
Tamika looked up just in time to see one more Strex goon lunge out of Carlsberg’s reach, plainly as startled by the outburst as she was. Steve Carlsberg was… laughing, hysterically, tears streaming down his face, shaking so much he’d already fallen over without his arms free to catch him.

Lauren Mallard paced toward him, her heels clicking on the pavement. One, two—

“I can’t believe it!” Carlsberg burbled. Was it just Tamika’s imagination, or was there a predatory note, now, in his smile? “I can’t believe it, oh,” he moaned, “Oh! You’re all in for it now, I can’t believe it!”

“In for _what?” _Lauren Mallard’s voice was just as sharp as her perfectly-manicured yellow nails when she took Steve’s chin in her fingers. “Explain it to me.”   
“You’re in for it now!”

“_Night Vale_.”

Tamika’s head whipped around. Was that—it was! It took a moment, but she finally located an old 1950s radio, perched on a windowsill. No-one in Night Vale went without a radio, even now, and the Voice that issued from it had only a hint of static.

“Please,” Cecil’s voice was coming through loud and clear, though it trembled even through the radio. “I do not know for how long I will be able to make myself heard to all of you before this channel is retaken, but _please_. Listen.” He paused, and in that pause, Lauren Mallard _shrieked, _slamming the radio to the ground.   
The Voice continued.   
“Tamika Flynn, who was never lost, has once again been found. Found, by those who have no business finding her. It is with a heavy heart, Night Vale that I make this proclamation, as Tamika bid me. Now is the time.”   
The radio sparked when Lauren’s foot came down on it, again and again, until it was left in tiny pieces. But the sound continued, echoing up even from its broken remains.

“You all know Tamika Flynn. She is the Beating Heart, the Lungs that Breathe, and she needs your help. _Night Vale_ needs your help.” Cecil pleaded. Tamika shivered at the feeling of that Voice, that wrapped her up in static with its ringing, but kept listening as best she could. Even Steve had finally shut up, and the stamp of Strex goons tearing the place apart for the other radios did little to obscure the sound of it. “So to all who listen to me now, whether in town or elsewhere, hidden or captured or in plain sight, please.” The power hung over Tamika’s head like an oncoming thunderstorm. It was starting to give her a headache, in fact.

“The time is now. I am the Voice of Night Vale, and you are not alone. The time is now. You will know your friends when you see them. You will find us, if you look. And we will find you. Mayor Winchell may be gone,” his voice sank to a mere whisper, “but there is power in Night Vale yet. The _time_ is _now_.”

Tamika smiled. The goons kept searching even after the broadcast ceased, frantic anxiety in their every move.

Finally Lauren stalked up to glare down at her captive. “Look around,” came her bladed voice. “Tamika Flynn. Kid hero, however old you are. You can do _nothing, _you understand me, nothing! You people have no chance. You can’t possibly be that _stupid, _can you?”   
Tamika ignored the way Lauren Mallard’s nails dug into her arm and her scalp when the woman held her head tilted up to face her. Darkness pooled in her stomach with all the stability of the desert sands.   
Tamika Flynn began to chant.

“We do not look around.  
“We do not look inside. We do not sleep.  
“Our god is not a smiling god.” Her heart pounded in her chest, her eyes stared, her teeth were bared.

“And we will end this war tonight.”  
  


~~~

Maria’s eyes widened when she heard that muffled voice. She couldn’t understand what it was saying, exactly, but that was definitely—Cecil?   
Something must have happened. Did he know Tamika had gotten caught, and hauled inside with Steve? Was the base attacked? What happened?! Why could she hear Cecil’s voice _inside the warehouse? _Either way, Tamika would not appreciate it if she just charged inside, even as a rescue. Instead, Maria wiggled her way back out to her sniper team. “Pull out,” she signed. “We’ll pick up Bayani and Kira on our way, but we need to regroup. They’ve got more forces in that warehouse than we can take on our own.”

And then she could find out what happened back at base.

~~~

Dana had a plan now.

It was a strange feeling, having a plan. Knowing what she was meant to do, because of something other than the possession of her body and will as a skin puppet for eldritch beings outside of all comprehension. She wasn’t entirely sure she liked it. But the world was as it was, and her will was, for now, her own.

“Dana?” A warm hand smoothed itself over her own. Maureen. “You okay?”   
Dana smiled up at the other woman. “For once, I do believe I am.” She leaned over the desk where Maureen perched to give her a gentle kiss. “There’s something I need to do before the Masked Army goes through, and I would like to share it with you, if I can. Come with me?”   
Maureen slipped off the desk, her curiosity roused. “Where to?”   
Dana didn’t answer, only led her upward in the mountain along a spiraling path. Soon enough, the sense of foreboding kicked in, but as Maureen clutched tighter to her sweetheart’s hand, it seemed to ease off a little. Did Dana even feel it?

Before long, they were higher than she’d ever been before, the air beginning to go thin. That, she had noticed, was a thing about this Desert Otherworld: The atmosphere was rather more changeable than it seemed to be in Night Vale, depending on the altitude and weather. Her calves ached, a little, as she climbed. Thank the beams it was her _arm_ that got bitten by those feral plastic bags years ago, and not her leg, because even without the exercise, her arm was starting to twinge painfully when she moved it. It would have been so much worse, in her leg.   
“Dana?” she asked.

“We’re almost there,” Dana reassured. It was unnerving, about how calm she sounded. “We will be there soon.”

There was something new about her, now, some hush of static that reminded her of Cecil more than anything else, or Station Management on a particularly bad day. Or Mayor Winchell, during that press conference that was invaded by a particularly vicious pack of hyenas with machine guns. One of them had actually managed to _scratch _the Mayor before getting instantly vaporized. Then again, Maureen was not nearly as familiar with the former mayor as she was with her Cecil or Dana. Maybe she was mistaken. But there was certainly something unfamiliar in that calm smile, something she couldn’t quite remember having seen in Dana before—well, before the Desert Otherworld, really. Was it something about her stint in the Dog Park? The Clouded Mountain? The desert itself?

Maureen studied her girlfriend from the corner of her eye. Maybe Dana would explain a little of it one day, if she even knew there was anything different about herself in the first place.   
“In here,” Dana’s dreamy voice murmured. “I don’t know that you’re supposed to be listening in on this, but, well…”

Maureen tightened her hand on her girlfriend’s. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be up this deep in the Mountain at all, to be honest. Not without you. I keep getting this… lingering sense of unease. Foreboding.” She shivered. “It’s better, the closer I am to you.”  
“Really?” That voice held only curiosity. “How strange. I’ve been getting a little bit of an itch, but not really anything more.” Dana twined her arm around her girlfriend’s, pressed another delicate kiss to the back of her hand. “Hold tight to me, then.” A smile, as the two of them stepped through another faintly glowing doorway. 

The room inside was unusually well lived-in, to say the least. Electric lanterns flickered on the ground, a handful of cushions sat leaning on the wall. There was even a stack of dirty, food-marked dishes toward the center, toppled over in front of an ancient door of what looked like oak.

Dana knocked on the door.   
“Hello? Mayor Winchell?” she asked.   
Maureen tensed. The _mayor? _What was Dana doing with the mayor?

After a long moment, the door creaked open. On the other side—it was funny. Maureen had half-expected to see sand, heat, a great expanse of ocean, to learn that Mayor Winchell had escaped to some beach somewhere like the City Council. Instead, Mayor Winchell lurked in her darkened office in City Hall, and the light that reflected off the rims of her spectacles looked almost like stars, twinkling in the dark. Maureen could just make out the barricade in front of the door, behind her.

“Ms. Cardinal,” Mayor Winchell greeted, the shadows on her face showing no emotion that Maureen could distinguish. “Intern Maureen. It’s good to see you two not dead. Why are you here?”   
Dana gave the former mayor a shallow bow. “I came bearing a question, actually.” The faint smile on her face did not fade. “The Voice has returned. He and Tamika Flynn have declared it time to bring an end to this war.”   
Pamela Winchell raised one eyebrow in blatant skepticism. “So?” she prompted.

“Once upon a time, you swore that the results of the election must be hidden from the people until it became time. I know you have a radio in there, Mayor Winchell. You know it is time.”  
The Mayor’s face clenched in a smile. “And so it is, Mayor Cardinal.”

Maureen jerked back in surprise. “Wait—now?!” She knew Dana was supposed to _become _mayor, not that she already was!

“Now,” Dana stated calmly. “The people know, and more will know before long. The time is now. I must take up my mantle, if I am to protect the town as you cannot. Maureen will witness for me.”

“I will?”   
“Please?” Dana turned to her. There was uncertainty in her face now, for the first time in a while. “It’s a ritual. We need a little blood, to transfer the office—okay, a lot of blood. There’s a reason why mayors tend to die gruesomely, but if there’s a third person involved, we can probably all survive.” When Maureen started to pull away, her girlfriend began to apologize. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you. You don’t have to do this, but… well, it needs to be someone who has touched death, not to mention someone I can physically get here, and you are both of those things. You’re the only person I’ve met who fits the criteria. I didn’t want to do it, of course, when I first learned about it, I mean I love you, but—but I can’t afford to just let Mayor Winchell die until I actually know how to use the mayoral powers, not with everything we need to do. And I… _think _it’ll all heal itself afterward.”   
“What, so you just _happened _to fall in love with the one person you need to, to_ dissect?” _

Dana flinched. “I only learned about this a couple days ago, Maureen. I’m _sorry, _okay? But I still don’t know exactly how it works, that’s why I brought you here even though you don’t have to agree to anything. And I really do want to share this whole Mayor thing with you, if I can, no matter what you decide.”

Maureen took a deep, calming breath.   
This wasn’t some manipulation on Dana’s part, truly, it wasn’t. If it were, why would she bother lying even now? “Will the ritual kill me?” her voice only trembled a little. “Or permanently incapacitate me at all?”

Dana gave no response, but Mayor Winchell did. “Not permanently, no. Temporary death and incapacitation only, assuming it works. Which it will. I have seen it done.”

“And the power this ritual grants you will do… what, exactly?”

The two mayors exchanged a glance, but it was again Mayor Winchell who answered. “Transfer the official mayoral powers from me to Mayor Cardinal, as should have been done long ago, when the results were announced. And because I will still be capable of coherent thought by the end of it, I will actually be able to teach Mayor Cardinal what she needs to know about using them. I can tell you now, those powers will be necessary in order to free Night Vale from Strexcorp in anything but the most temporary sense—all three offices will need to be together, to seize it back. Heart, Mind, and Voice, and all in their full power.” She tilted her head in acknowledgement. “I am no longer rightful Mayor of Night Vale, so I cannot hold the place of Mind in anything but name. Dana can.”

That clinched it.   
Regardless of to what extent Dana was staying true to her word, why would Mayor Winchell lie about how to take back Night Vale? Evade the question entirely, yes. Pretend she could not hear it in favor of turning into a horse and stamping whoever asked into a fine red mist, absolutely. But lie? No. If Night Vale needed the help of a radio intern who should probably be dead already anyway, her help it would have. One way or another.

Maureen gripped her girlfriend’s hand as tightly as she could stand.   
Nodded.

“Okay,” she murmured. “I’ll do it. For Night Vale.”


	15. Passing the Frontiers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... So this has been a time.  
Sorry I missed the update last week. I wanted to get home for the summer before the borders closed, so I would actually have a place to exist instead of being trapped all the way off where I live during the year and eventually being evicted, which meant that me and my one remaining flatmate had to abruptly move out over the course of a week. ;0_0 But we did it! And I flew home, about six hours before an actual official lockdown went into place which would have kept me grounded. And now I'm in quarantine at home, but at least I'm here! So. Yeah. 
> 
> Enough of that.  
Time for some victory in the face of angst, and completely fictional crises! 
> 
> Chapter CWs: some mild violence

The portal room was… underwhelming.

From top to bottom, it was coated in the same shining white tiles and ugly yellow walls as the rest of Strexcorp HQ in Desert Bluffs, and brightly lit despite the complete lack of visible sources for that light. The main difference was that this room was round, for some reason, and mostly empty, crawling with static even though the door was not yet active. It seemed unlike Strex to leave any room unused for long, but maybe the buzzing put them off? It certainly weirded Janice out too much to stay in it for long.  
Janice wheeled a little closer to the wide oak door in the center. It didn’t _seem_ like it was active. Sure enough, when she prodded it open with a pen, only the rest of the room shone through on the other side. And that was odd—the words carved onto the door’s frame _looked _like Weird Sumerian, but she couldn’t read them. Maybe it was the way they seemed to squirm under her eyes with the grain of the wood.  
“I’m here,” she whispered into her earpiece, just so Uncle Cecil would know. Everyone else was already off getting ready. Hesitantly, Janice set one palm flat on the door. “Dana said I should just try and pray, right?”

_Right_, she thought. Breathe in, breathe out.

A tickle of anxiety kept Janice from sinking into trance.  
This didn’t feel like a good idea. Even to her, it just felt… dangerous, like the squirming in her stomach before a shooter drove by on Cruise Night. But all of her options, at this point, were dangerous. At least this didn’t fill her with the need to run screaming. At least this would probably actually _do _something.

Janice opened her eyes and turned around. She rolled back to the door into the hallway, pricking her finger and drawing a magic lock on the handle. It wouldn’t hold forever, not against a concerted attack, but it would at least be better than the remains of the original lock that she’d had to shoot to get inside. She got back into place. Maybe she would be safer, or at least _feel_ safer, if she had her own bloodstone circle around her? Something a little less ancient than the one built into pillars in the walls, that still felt soothing instead of ominous. Janice dug around in her bag for a few seconds, never taking her eyes off the door. If nothing else, a bloodstone circle would help to shield her a bit from whatever psychic mess was going on in this town.

Seven stones, placed gently in their places surrounding her chair and the inactive Door.

It was now or never.

Janice settled herself a little more comfortably in her chair.  
She laced her hands over her knees, as she’d been taught, and closed her eyes. That was definitely a little better.

She started with a chant in Weird Spanish. A familiar choice, that, just hard enough to occupy her attention, make her focus on the words and the rhythm. By the time her mind was clear, she found herself drifting off into Unmodified Sumerian, Triple Greek, and other languages more advanced than anything she typically used. But if that was where the humming took her—what else was she supposed to do? The chanting did not so much _clear _her mind as fill it—every neuron, every inch of space, every thought bubbling over with the static roar of energy and rhythm and—_oh, _she always enjoyed this part, in an exhausting, cathartic sort of way.

Someone was at the door.

Voices, babbling English, trying to get it open. Janice ignored them in rather the same way a rhinoceros was prone to ignore a fly perching on its shoulder. Her instructions were clear.

By the time the door was open, Janice was almost done. She turned around.  
“_Now you just need a little bit more blood, dear, only it really shouldn’t be yours. You’ve lost enough already,_” muttered the voice on her shoulder. “_How about one of them? Even their oil should do._”  
She could hardly see.  
Everything was so bright, so light outside her little circle of buzzing shade, all she could make out was the vague silhouette of what was presumably another Strex drone as it stepped inside her circle. Janice pointed her clasped fingers as it came into focus. It was not her will which loaded the finger guns this time, her will which was still submerged in static. But when she dropped the hammer and fired—

The Strex employee fell.  
Blood seeped out of it, or something like blood, dark and slick and spreading on the ground. It felt automatic, to Janice, bending down and dipping her fingers in the stuff, drawing a trail of blood to the door itself.

And there was silence.

The room with the door inside had not been particularly large, when Janice began this endeavor. Or at least, she hadn’t noticed anything. But now, the world was stretching and burning around her, and before long—

A being stepped out of the door.

It spoke in a language that buzzed and bit like horseflies in her mind. It loomed taller than the door, even now, though only by a foot or two, even though it loomed a good _twenty_ feet tall above her. The mask on its face, long-featured and colorful, only made it feel larger.  
“_You’ve been very helpful, Janice_,” came that so-familiar voice. “_But I’ve got to go now. Why don’t you hop up on Kaphr’s shoulder, so you can keep out of the way and still fight?_”  
The voice followed that up in the chiming language, until the Masked Giant—Kaphr—nodded, his demeanor calm and solemn even here. Did the buzzing not bother him? Janice swayed a little in her chair. But when Kaphr offered a hand, she stumbled over to it for a lift, and after the voice in her ear whispered some other ringing set of words, Kaphr picked up her chair, too, and gave it to Janice to collapse.  
With the girl scout safely ensconced on their shoulder, the Masked Army moved out.

“Old Woman Josie?” Janice whispered, to the voice which had finally subsided. “Thank you.”

~~~

Tamika lapsed back into silence after Lauren Mallard left in a huff. It was boring, being a prisoner. All she could do was sit here, trying to ignore the way her muscles seizing up from the uncomfortable position. That and keep a weather eye on Carlsberg, where he still lolled dazedly in his bonds.

The team hadn’t come in after her, at least. That was good.

They would live, to report back to Janice and Cecil, and try and fix this mess she’d gotten them all into. And while Janice certainly wouldn’t be happy, she would do her job as interim leader. At least Tamika didn’t have to worry about that part anymore, now that she’d already been captured once. Janice would keep them going without a problem. And now that Cecil had declared this the last ditch effort, someone would be bound to go after her and Carlsberg eventually. Not until they had a stronger force, of course, knowing Janice, but—well. All she had to was wait, right?

Tamika stubbornly ignored the dread in her stomach. Sure, her captivity here could easily be made a lot less boring, in the worst possible way, but they hadn’t done anything so far.

She leaned to one side, rolling her shoulders as best she could. Ugh. Hopefully they’d get here before the constant backward pressure managed to dislocate her shoulders.  
At least Carlsberg looked _somewhat _more coherent now. Less jacked up on the fluffy clouds and giddiness stage of the Strex drugs than before, if nothing else. Maybe he was getting on toward the unmitigated terror stage? Tamika glanced up at him. He didn’t look particularly scared. More just… intense. Focused. Not hysterical anymore, interestingly. But still, that begged the question: Why hadn’t the Strex goons given him another dose? They didn’t like their prisoners focused, Tamika knew that personally. Just how coherent was he?

She lowered her head a little, looking up at Carlsberg through the couple of twists of hair that fell across her face as she did. _Come on. Look at me, Carlsberg. Come on! _

It would be just like him to be faking some of the drug effects, honestly. He would be affected, of course—but that man was certainly crazy enough to get a hold of their drugs beforehand to try and build up an immunity to the stuff, or test possible antidotes on himself. If he’d found something that worked completely, he would certainly have shared it with the Readers if he got the chance. But if he’d only figured out something that lessened the effect a little, or turned it to something he was used to enough to manage, would he?  
Maybe not.  
Hell, it might just be all the re-education he’d already gone through, that incidentally built up his resistance to that entire class of drugs.

Or maybe he wasn’t faking. Tamika scowled. He still had yet to look at her for more than half a second.

There was a sudden movement.  
When she glanced up, it was Lauren Mallard, straightening as she listened to something in her earpiece. A murderous expression lanced across her face, then smoothed itself out. “Get that replacement transport here already, then!” she snapped. “We should try to get back to headquarters before anything happens.”

Tamika couldn’t help the clenching of her gut. Headquarters. There’d be no prying them out of there once Strex got them settled in, and they would be bound to—_no._  
She wrenched her thoughts away. No use contemplating the worst. If that happened, she would just have to figure something out again. In the meantime, the Readers had to know where Strex was going to take them. They’d figure something out. Probably. Right?

“You know that time estimate isn’t going to last for as long as it takes to get the helicopter here, right? Time is unreliable in this area, it’s incredibly inefficient.” A pause. “Yes, I know. It’s on the list. An escort volunteered?” Lauren Mallard actually sounded pleased at that. Tamika seethed in her corner. “And it’s been verified as one of ours. Good. Yes, KH18, understood. Now get back to work.”

Transport back to headquarters. _Damn it!  
_That couldn’t bode well—but if she could get news back to base that they were about to be moved, and in a single helicopter at that, it would be an excellent place to attack. _Yes, _she thought. _I think I can tell Cecil, if I can launch myself into a proper trance. _While their captor was distracted, Carlsberg finally met her gaze—and Tamika winked.  
His eyes widened microscopically. He gave just a hint of a grin, flickering back over to where Lauren Mallard muttered something to a guard.  
Carlsberg was definitely awake.

They were making progress.

Maybe half an hour later, the _thwop-thwop-thwop_ of helicopter blades woke Tamika from her the meditative state she’d slipped into. Vengeful glee was all very well, but when it faded away, her joints _ached_ in this position. Especially her bad hip. Meditation, she’d learned a long time ago, was an excellent way to tune some of that out, not to mention a way to call Cecil’s broadcasting attentions.

Lauren Mallard’s smile was cutting.  
“I hear you, pilot. You’re cleared to land,” she answered some unheard query on the other end of her radio. “I’m taking the prisoners up now. Be on your guard.”

Sure enough, a pair of goons unclipped her handcuffs from the ground. Tamika thought about fighting back—but then again, if her memory was right, the helicopter would be a much better place to do so, since she would have backup there. She squirmed a little for appearance’s sake, spit in the face of one of the goons, but let them haul her up and toward the elevator. _How is it that they use the elevators we have here, but don’t even bother installing them in Desert Bluffs? _She huffed to herself. _Hypocrites. _  
Lauren led the way, her heels clicking on the cement as she walked up to the helicopter that had actually landed.  
“Come on!” she barked. “Get the prisoners loaded.”

Instead of seatbelts and padding, one bench of the helicopter’s interior was equipped with d-rings set directly into the plastic of the bench, and metal plates in the floor. _Sloppy, _she thought, _and uncomfortable at that. What kind of secret police force doesn’t even _try_ to see to the comfort of the people it kidnaps?_ Tamika stumbled a little on the way, but let herself be strapped in, her cuffs attached to the bench behind her. She might be able to break the plastic if she pulled hard enough, not that that would get her out of the cuffs entirely.

Carlsberg, evidently, had gone back to pretending to be doped up on whatever Strex gave him, if it was pretending. He actually fell over on the threshold of the helicopter. The goon escorting him rolled his eyes, but hauled Carlsberg to his feet and onto the bench despite that obvious exasperation. Clipped him to the bench next to Tamika. As soon as Carlsberg was no longer being supported to stay upright, he fell limply to one side—and onto Tamika.  
Perfect.  
They could actually communicate in private, then, by means of codes tapped out on each other’s skin. Tamika pretended irritation, jerking away from the man now slumped on her shoulder.

Lauren Mallard smirked. “Don’t worry, Miss Flynn. You’ll get away from him soon enough, and then I don’t think you’ll be seeing Mr. Carlsberg ever again! He is quite an eyesore, I’m sure you agree.”

The helicopter took off.

Tamika Flynn surveyed her surroundings.  
Helpful: herself, and a Steve Carlsberg that was probably still moderately drugged. A whole small army of Readers on the ground, who may or may not know where she was. Hostile: Lauren Mallard, NVCR Program Director. Two Strex goons. The pilot. And a whole other escort helicopter full of goons.

_This should be doable, _she thought. _If the rest of the Readers know what’s going on. _

_Plans? _A breath of air spelled out on her arm. It was always a little muddy, using breath for Morse code, but doable. And hard to notice from outside, if the speaker was careful.  
Tamika had it a little easier, with her fingers just in reach of Carlsberg’s arm. _I think the other helicopter is ours, _she answered. _Ambush likely._

Carlsberg’s next breath was one long hiss, though whether it was relief or anxiety, she couldn’t tell. _I don’t hear anyone else. But I see—  
_See?  
_Just one.  
_Tamika blinked. _Just one what? _She asked. Since when did Carlsberg have _visions, _anyway? But before the man could answer, there was a bone-rattling thump.

She jerked upright.

“Whew!”  
She didn’t recognize the voice that crackled through from the speakers, so loud if overrode even the deafening thumps of the helicopter. “Damn, I haven’t gone flying in ages! Feels good!” Something sparked on the edge of the door, and then—the whole door went flying off the side of the helicopter, to reveal…  
A suit of plate armor, shining gold and red.  
Floating in thin air.

The suit of armor lunged inside, fumbling for the clasp to whatever held Tamika and Carlsberg to their seats. When it couldn’t find it in a few bare seconds, it just grabbed each of her wrists instead. Tamika leaned against the suit, and with a hum of motors, the armor yanked her arms apart until the plastic connecting them snapped. _Ouch_.

Just in time, because one of the goons had started to stand up, uneasily lurching its way across the floor. Tamika put her hands together into a finger gun, and shot it in a burst of adrenaline. The goon shuddered backward—but it wasn’t enough to kill it, only enough to bring black oil pouring from the hole. Tamika gave it one solid shove and the goon went toppling out the open helicopter door.

Steve stood up, finally. He must still be a little drugged after all, because he kept listing to the side even now. When he noticed, he started clinging to the suit of armor instead. He pointed back at Lauren—

_Oh shit_. Lauren Mallard was _praying, _that couldn’t be good. And the other goon pulled a gun off the wall, hefting it up—

The suit of armor grabbed it, wrenching the gun out of his hand. “None of that,” she could only just hear the words over the rush of wind. Tamika pulled another burst of energy up into her fingers, and—a flash of light smashed through the helicopter.  
Lauren Mallard was gone.

The armor’s faceplate snapped up. “Did you miss me?”   
The man inside smirked. Dark hair, tired eyes, pale skin of an engineer who only occasionally went out in the sunlight- _Ah, _thought Tamika. _It's the interloper! I want a flying suit of armor like that. _   
“Grab on, I’ll give you a ride down.” It only took a moment for Tamika to assess just how few other options she had. And then she gave a feral grin, and wrapped herself around the man in the suit of armor, leaving Carlsberg to cling to his shoulder. The interloper’s helmet slammed shut.  
And they flew.

It was the first time in years that Tamika Flynn had properly laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay safe, everybody!


	16. Leaving Early to Avoid the Rush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which things begin to come together, and I regret making all these chapters as short as I did. 
> 
> No chapter CWs needed?

Flying was the most fun Tamika had had in _ages. _Even if really, she was just holding on to someone else who could fly. It was cold, and deafening, and she could _see everything _from here! _Awesome. _She was grinning ear-to-ear by the time they landed.  
Behind… Night Vale City Hall?  
“What are we… doing here?” After a long moment, Tamika buried the grin on her face and the exhilaration in her stomach. She had a war to win. Even if Steve was completely oblivious to that fact, stumbling off with trembling limbs and sweat on his skin—he was _definitely _still high off his ass. He was even grinning that horrible, artificial grin.  
Tamika tore herself away from that nauseating expression and the filthy sickness in her gut. Carlsberg did not deserve to have that plastic smile on his face. She would rip the smile off whoever did that to him if she had to kill the Smiling God with nothing but her pocket knife to do it.

“City Hall?” Stark’s faceplate snapped open again. “I don’t know. John—er, Cecil, I guess—said to come here to meet up with someone. Apparently we’re starting the attack here?”

Tamika frowned. “Alone?”

“Not alone.” Maria’s voice rang out.  
A moment later, the five other members of the warehouse team shifted into view, accompanied by that agent for the vague yet ominous government agency that had accompanied the interlopers into town. Coulson, that was his name. “We found a radio. John said to come here, since we’ve all got our invisibility badges anyway. Apparently Dana Cardinal has a mission for you? She said it’s really important.”

“In City Hall.” Tamika frowned. Why would she need something from City Hall? The place was useless!  
“JARVIS?” Stark prompted. “Can you pick up the broadcast and pipe it out here?”  
“Of course, master Stark.”  
A few seconds of fiddling with the radio in Maria’s hands, and Cecil’s voice began murmuring out from Stark’s armor as well. “There we go.” The man’s smile was smug. “JARVIS, I take it you’ve found the right frequency?”  
“I believe so, Master Stark.” The voice replied. “Though it feels… strange.”  
That seemed to catch Stark off guard. “Strange? Strange how?”  
“I’m not sure. It… tickles. In my circuits. I move slow, then fast, then slow again—it is supremely confusing, sir.”  
A pause. “Well,” Stark bit his lip. “I guess we’ll have to cope. It’ll probably be fine, right?”  
“Most likely, sir. The signal seems happy to let me listen in, for the moment, insofar as a radio signal can experience emotion.”  
“Anyway.” The interloper gave himself a good shake. “What exactly _are_ we supposed to be doing here? John said something about a door…”

Unseen, or at least unnoticed, Steve Carlsberg wandered woozily off, his mind a battlefield that would not rest.

~~~

When Maureen opened her eyes, it was to shadows and a truly killer headache.

“Great beams, that hurt…” a voice trailed off beside her. No-longer-mayor Pamela Winchell, she recognized after a moment, no longer half as startled as she should be. “Definitely worked, though,” the former mayor added with a faint chuckle.

Maureen glanced over. The stone beneath them was hard and blessedly cool, but not exactly comfortable. Pamela Winchell, however, was sprawled out it like it was the most comfortable bed she could have wished for. Ugh.  
“… Dana?” Maureen murmured. Where was Dana? She really couldn’t recall much of the ritual itself—a blinding darkness, somehow distinct from the bright black light of the tall creatures named Erika. Pain, and a feeling like her brain was filled with angry hyperbees, complete with constant short-range teleportation and drill-like stingers. It had been more disorienting than anything else, that part, and at least all the wounds she’d sustained for the sake of the ritual were healed, now. Apparently it hadn’t been much better for the now-former mayor, either. But where did Dana go? “Dana!” she called, again.

“Right here,” a dreamy voice floated by.

Dana, when she drifted into sight, was clearly in the best shape of all of them. Dark brown skin largely intact, if a little more scarred than previously, a neat cloud of hair about her head, her eyes tired but preoccupied—yes, she actually looked to be in a pretty good state.  
“Maureen?” she prompted. “Mayor—I mean, Madame Winchell? Are you alright?” Dana was _standing _already, even if she seemed to sway a little in place. “I need an extra pair of hands, if you two wouldn’t mind.”

It took a moment for either other woman to succeed in levering themselves up, during which they shared a brief look of commiseration. But eventually, Maureen managed it. “What is it? Another short notice organ donation? My body is ready.”  
Pamela Winchell barked out a hollow laugh, but Dana didn’t seem to notice her sarcasm.  
“Actually, I need to evacuate Night Vale from the Mountain.” Dana’s eyes were fixed on her. “Preferably also from this Desert Otherworld as a whole, but the Mountain, at least, will become extraordinarily dangerous, and very soon. I would like to keep my people safe, inasmuch as that is possible. In the meantime, however, there are other Mayoral powers which I must make use of, before it becomes too late.” At this, the Mayor turned a little sheepish. “Could I maybe ask the two of you to help evacuate? The Door in my office, I think, should do the trick.”

Pamela Winchell sighed. “Good luck with that,” she muttered. “I’ll be up in a few minutes,” that part seemed to be addressed to Maureen herself. “But evacuating really is a good idea. There’s going to be rather a lot more light than mortal flesh can handle, assuming everyone succeeds. If I recall correctly.”

“Light,” Dana murmured, and the detached tone there was a little much even for Dana. “Is that what that was? I wasn’t sure.”   
Maureen sighed. “Yeah. I’ll deal with it. Just… stay safe, Dana, okay? I still love you, and I fully expect you to come back alive and capable of human interaction.”

Maureen teetered out the doorway. _Oh good_, she thought. The air here didn’t seem to be rejecting her anymore. Maybe she _would _make it safely back out after all. She let out a slow breath. Alright. Evacuate the Clouded Mountain. She could do that. 

* * *

Soon enough, she was back down in the known section of the mountain, gasping in breaths from the seeming endless stairs. The Door still left an ominous ringing in her bones, but if Dana said that was the right thing to do—well, Maureen certainly didn’t have any better ideas. She might as well. Especially if she wouldn’t have to be the first to cross the threshold of that thing.

Maureen thought about giving a speech. On the one hand, she could, and it would probably get the job done eventually—but no. She didn’t like giving speeches, to be honest, that was one of the few things she’d learned during her internship beyond improved survival skills. Surely Pamela Winchell could, whenever the former mayor made it down here. In the meantime, Maureen would go about the evacuation quietly: By finding the de facto leader of the Night Vale refugees among the populace, which here would probably be John Peters (you know, the farmer?), and telling him what was going on.  
“Excuse me—”  
John Peters widened his eyes, backing away from her.

“I’m not dead! Or possessed!” It took some effort to keep her temper in line. “I promise. I just wanted to talk to you. Dana is the Mayor, now.”  
“Obviously,” the farmer drawled. “I’ve known for years. What about it?”  
He… what? The results of the election were never announced officially. Maureen only knew because Dana’d told her, after they reunited! Nevertheless, she let it slip by. “…right. Well, we need to evacuate the Mountain. Through the Door here, in the middle. It should be unlocked, and I _think _it leads to Night Vale.”

“No can do,” John Peters chewed on the piece of hay which had, somehow, made it into his mouth. “That door freaks me out. I’m not going near it.”  
“We _have _to,” Maureen hissed. “I don’t like it either, but it needs to be done. We can push someone else through first, to make sure it won’t do anything unfortunate, but we _need _to go through. It won’t be safe here.”  
“Night Vale isn’t safe either.”  
“I know, but Dana—Mayor Cardinal, I mean—says it will be safer there! Something about light—”

That was when Pamela Winchell panted her way into the room. 

The former mayor’s approach was much more efficient.  
“Everybody up!” she yelled, and the populace obeyed. Before long, she kicked the door open and started ushering people through. Not everyone went where they were told, of course, but—well, Pamela Winchell was excellent at taking authority and directing the relatively weak-willed. It was probably something about the way her stare positively _shook_ with intent, even now. For her own part, Maureen made herself useful by going through all the more reluctant citizens and trying to cajole them into leaving. Or, failing that, taking a page from the Sheriff’s Secret Police and intimidating people—or more efficiently, by hitting them over the head with a bat and tossing them through the door by hand.

Not that the Sheriff’s Secret Police were _usually_ that sloppy. But only about half of them were willing to help, given that they weren’t actually getting paid out here, and also that no-one knew where the door led. 

_Oh, well._ Maureen consoled herself. _I haven’t heard any screaming yet._ No matter where it was, if what Dana and Winchell had been saying about a deadly light was true, they would all have better odds of survival wherever this led, even if that wasn’t Night Vale. Right?  
Dana knew what she was doing.

* * *

  
When Maureen finally stepped through, her heart plummeted in her chest.

She knew exactly where this was.  
She took a deep breath, turning to toss a horrified glance at the cautious face of Pamela Winchell. “Here?” she hissed. “It has to be _here?! _I reported here for Cecil when those penguins showed up, I only barely escaped with my life!”  
“Well, it is Night Vale.” Madame Winchell shrugged. Her eyes flicked from corner to corner, and expert escape artist casing her latest cage. “City Hall, to be exact.”  
“I _know_ that!” It took serious effort for Maureen to keep her voice down. “But Strexcorp has got to have control of this place already, we can’t just, what? March out of here? All several hundred of us?”  
Pamela Winchell looked only a little troubled. “Have faith,” she answered. “Besides, if nothing else, I am quite certain I know the building better than any corporate overlords—well, these particular corporate overlords, anyway. I did work here for several decades. How about… this way! We can stop by the armory, make sure everyone here is ready for a fight.”  
Maureen sighed. “I suppose if anyone can get out of this place alive, it’s you and me. Let’s take the lead.”

The group of newly-returned Night Valians was rather hurried, for such an aimless collection of people. Nevertheless, they made it to what was at one point an armory without needing to murder more than half a dozen Strex employees. All it took, unnervingly enough, was sharp teeth, numbers, and a good dose of mob mentality. None of those were hard to find in Night Vale. The pair of guards posted on the armory doors were the toughest, probably due to their robotic nature, since the sparking wires left extruding from their corpses kept shocking anyone who touched them. And inside…

It was just as well Maureen and Madam Winchell were here to ensure some kind of order. There were nowhere near enough weapons for everyone. But they handed bows and firearms out to the children, and those others who would have more trouble with a close-up confrontation, and radio sets to a handful of different people who promised to try and stay out of trouble. As well as, of course, one each for herself, Madam Winchell, and John Peters—you know, the farmer? Madam Winchell did have her own radio, of course, attached to some kind of headset, which she pulled wholesale from her open mouth. That helped stretch the supplies out by quite a bit, especially since she admitted she had no need for a gun. Cecil’s emergency broadcast was in full swing, too.

“Do not fear, all you who prepare to enter City Hall,” that voice rang out the moment they got the radio tuned to the correct station. “It appears you will have help, inside. Your task is to get them out, and yourselves in. I do not know what plans the beings who are most certainly not angels have for this Desert Otherworld, but given that most of the population of that Desert Otherworld have left, I take it the plans are far from pleasant.”  
Maureen blinked. Was that what Dana was doing, making it so that they would have help getting out?  
A pause.  
“Ooh!” Cecil cooed some small noise of delight. “My former intern, Dana Cardinal—make that Mayor Dana Cardinal—says that you _should _find the City Council inside, if all goes well. Not in the same place as the door which the new arrivals took in, exactly, but by a similar room, that is similarly dark and bright and full of deadly pathogens.”

Was that a direction?  
Maureen frowned. It certainly wasn’t enough to go on. Perhaps they should focus on getting out first—and wasn’t City Council still on holiday, anyway?

“Listeners, I admit, I’m not so sure that City Council will be where they are supposed to be,” Cecil confided into the microphone. “They have spent the past four years on an extended, short-notice holiday on the beach, after all. But Mayor Cardinal says to have faith,” he sighed, “and it never does anyone any good to argue when her eyes have that creeping, hollow look to them.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter! 
> 
> Chapter CWs: Minor character death, some not-super-graphic injuries and fighting, and also a bit of eldritch horror. Cecil is trying his best to warn his people, but-- well, he only knows so much.

The invasion of Desert Bluffs was going weirdly well.

The Masked Army was a little big to fit inside the buildings, but they were easily strong enough to punch through walls regardless. Janice, up on her rocking perch on Kaphr’s shoulder, didn’t actually have to do much. She was busy, of course—shielding herself, glaring at Strex guns until they got jammed and stopped working, that sort of thing. But most of that was just protecting _herself_—ordinary bullets, after all, didn’t do a whole lot to the army of giants that walked through the Door. And after the first few minutes, one of the Masked Army had thought to give her a lovely, if bloodied, shotgun, even if she didn’t always have a clear line of sight. Once Janice tied herself loosely to Kaphr with a bundle of rope from her bag, she even felt comfortable enough to lie down and use zer shoulder as a stand.   
_Bang!_  
Another one down. Sometimes, the Strex drones would manage to magic her gun jammed, despite the weird angle and small target it made. It wasn’t exactly hard, after all. But Janice was better at magic than most of them, and it was easy for her to just discard a now-useless weapon in favor of being handed a new one instead.   
_Bang! Bang!_   
Two more shots, picked out on reflex and nailing the drones right in the head. _Perfect!_   
Janice did feel a little bad about how many people they were killing, but… well, the extent to which these things were _people,_ per say, was debatable, in many cases. Besides, they tried to kill her first!

With a resounding _crunch, _Kaphr broke through to the outside of the building. Janice ducked a bit of rubble. The rock bounced off her back hard enough to leave a bruise, and she winced. The fresh air, at least, was nice.

“Janice and the Masked Army have made it outside,” she could hear Uncle Cecil’s report, tense though his voice was. “into the light of day. Is it supposed to be daylight there? I suppose it must, I mean it is only early afternoon.” He hesitated. “I did not notice this before, but it seems that Janice is the only member of her group, possibly the only living thing in Desert Bluffs, to cast a shadow.” That voice deepened and smoothed itself out at that, edging into a tone she recognized as that of prophecy. “Soon, even she will have no shadow, for the sun is no friend of ours.”

What in the beam’s name did _that _mean? Sure enough, when Janice stole a glance down at the ground, the only shadow she could see was her own—but how? And why would she—_Oh. _

Janice swallowed.

Something terrible would have to happen.  
What were they supposed to do next, anyway? She squinted down at the town around her. The people weren’t even panicking, for the most part, they were just going about their business unless their business had been inside a wrecked building, like they hardly noticed the giants invading. Should she just… start destroying things? A frown.

There was a final boom as something else collapsed behind them.

And then—

_Light. _

* * *

Tamika and the team around her froze when a flash of light illuminated the world.

“What the hell was that?” Stark whispered. “What the _hell _was—”   
“Inside. Now.” Tamika hissed. “Through the window, come on, Lauren Mallard just landed and she is absolutely bad news.”   
“But—”   
Maria shoved past him to start scaling the wall, the toes of her boots digging into the brick. Soon enough, she’d wormed her way up and slipped inside after smashing the window by means of her backpack, and before Tony could blink, she had a rope dangling out the window. One of the other kids was next, a small and wiry islander who barely even used the rope. When it came to be Tony’s turn, even he managed to squeeze through the opening, with difficulty. Coulson, of course, launched himself through with ease. Show-off.

Tamika followed last, using the rope to compensate for the hip that didn’t seem to move quite as it should, and then immediately ducked beneath the sill.   
They all held their breath.

_Click, click, click, _went Lauren Mallard’s heels. _Click. _Finally, they walked off again, and Tamika cracked a sour sort of smile.

“Alright,” she signed. Tony murmured a request to JARVIS, and soon enough, a rough translation started playing in his ear. The AI still wasn’t fantastic at recognizing ASL, but he’d certainly put some effort into improving it since they landed in Night Vale. JARVIS at least managed to reliably get the meaning across, for the most part, even if the syntax seemed completely backward for English. Maybe that was just an ASL thing?   
“You all heard Cecil,” Tamika continued. “Maureen and a bunch of other people just came out a door toward the back of City Hall, they should be armed by now. We need to make contact with them, and then they need to get outside, or preferably continue trying to take down their headquarters. Remember your Voltaire, for that—‘a State can be no better than the citizens of which it is composed’, Candide. Mayor Cardinal, I’m sure, would insist that they leave and be safer, but to be honest, nowhere in Night Vale is safe right now, if it ever has been. After that, some small group is going to need to find City Council—they should be in here somewhere, apparently.” Why did it sound like the girl didn’t believe that for a minute? “I’m going to track them down. Maria, how do you feel about leading Maureen and her group out of the building?”

The taller girl shrugged. “I suppose. I’m not terribly inspirational, though, if you want me to convince them to stay and fight. Especially not if the Mayor is with them.”

Tony hesitated for a moment before jumping in.   
“Look, I’m not gonna be nearly so much use in close quarters." He shrugged. "I’m maneuverable, I should be heading back outside where I can do a little more good. You guys seriously need some anti-aircraft stuff anyway, what with all the yellow helicopters. Besides, somebody needs to look for the other guy who was stuck in the helicopter with you—you know, Steve Carlsberg? He disappeared, and we shouldn’t just _leave_ the guy out here with a war on.”  
“Very well.” Tamika nodded briskly her hair bobbing with the motion. “I admit, forgot about Steve—but then again, he’s a competent adult, even high off his ass on reeducation drugs. I wouldn’t worry too much about tracking him down. Maria, take Stark with you. Between him and the people from the Desert Otherworld, you should have plenty of firepower to get everyone out of the building and start an actual assault. I’ll take Coulson, Bayani and Kira, plus the other sniper team. Sound good?”

Tony watched in bemusement as the children saluted. Before they split up, Coulson pressed something into his hand. “An offering, Mr. Stark,” he whispered. “For City Council, if you find them instead.”  
“What is this, a happy meal figure of Batman?”  
It was Coulson’s turn to smirk. “A miniature POP! figure, actually. City Council likes them, and you always need to give them _something _if you don’t want your organs turned inside out.”   
“What—”

“It’s true,” the first kid through the window snickered. Bayani, apparently, was his name. “Especially since you haven’t got your regalia on you. Outsiders never think to bring their soft meat crowns.”  
“My _what??” _

“Oh, leave him be,” Tamika ordered. “He’s got a tribute, he’ll be fine. Besides, we can't split up until we find the exit. I'm not letting anyone go outside from here when we know Lauren Mallard's lying in wait.” 

They turned the corner so they could split up, and—

Something was wrong with the Strexcorp drones.

They didn’t walk anymore. They didn’t talk. They didn’t scream, not even the ones that normally could, even when they took an arrow to the throat in the hopes of keeping things quiet. They just stood there, eerily still, their eyes echoing with a foreign light, and when they turned to face the Readers—  
The Strex drone’s face unhinged from its head, and terrible light poured out.

Most of them managed to duck out of the way, whether on pure instinct or when shoved by someone else. Kira, caught by surprise, screeched like a wild rabbit when the light touched her, and by the time Maria had the presence of mind to grab her rifle and shoot the drone, what was left of Kira’s body was burnt and blackened.   
“Got it,” someone said into the silence. “Don’t touch the light.” 

They left the bodies where they lay.

The only people left that didn’t look a little green were Tamika and Coulson. Tony was sure he looked no better—not that he felt nauseous, exactly, more just… detached. Dissociating.   
How was it only a couple months ago that he thought he’d gotten used to fighting? Maybe it was because he always tended to be on the winning side, before. This, this sneaking around, this guerrilla fighting in deadly silence? It felt so much worse, somehow. So much more helpless. Three more times, they got taken by surprise. The first time they all got behind cover in time, but on the second, another kid died, and on the third, Maria’s hand was still sticking out. By the time someone shot the Strex soldier in question, her face was pale and her lip trailed blood in an effort to keep from screaming. Her right hand, however, was toast.

_Stop, _Maria signaled with her working hand, when the light at last subsided. _We’ve got company.   
_But if the Strex people, for the most part, weren’t moving, then who was responsible for that herd of tramping feet?   
The footsteps stopped.   
“Hello?”

The Readers straightened.   
“Mayor Winchell—er, Madame Winchell, I mean. And intern Maureen!” Bayani stuttered. “Hello.”

Tony finally stood up, wincing at the ache in his joints. On the far end of the hallway stood two women, actual _adults _for once—the one in front was mid-height and muscular with long brown hair, while slightly behind her stood an older, stout, imposing woman whose short curls and olive skin were somewhat marred by the blood spattered across them. A moment later, they were followed by a crowd that shifted and muttered to itself like some wild beast, which seemed much less out of place given the copious bloodstains on its member’s hands and clothes. Some of them, it looked like, had to have been touched by the burning light, and yet they appeared to be mostly intact.

“Yes, yes, I’ve retired as Mayor,” the older woman muttered. “Finally. It’s been long overdue, and at least _I _survived my resignation.” The stare she levelled at Tony could have bowled him over with its strength. As it was, its hollowness combined with that frantic energy that tensed in every line of her body put the inventor on edge. “An interloper, I see. And you, Phillip Coulson, you’re the one the town kept nagging me about letting through the boundary. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t entirely have a choice,” the SHIELD agent bowed. “Though I am glad to hear that your retirement’s been going well, now that it’s actually begun. And Maureen, did I hear correctly that you’re a radio intern?” Why did Coulson make that sound like some great achievement? Being an intern?

“Former,” the young woman said shortly. “And I have got some _words _for Cecil when I finally get to see him, I am _not _doing this again. Anyway. Mind pointing us to the exit?”

Madame Winchell pursed her lips a moment before speaking. “Actually, Intern Maureen, why don’t you go with Tamika and her friends? Mayor Cardinal did say she wanted to share with you, after all, and that is where General Flynn is going, you know.” Maureen lifted a quizzical eyebrow at that, but no response was forthcoming.  
“Fine,” she said eventually. “But if City Council doesn’t show up…”  
“Have faith,” Madame Winchell answered through gritted teeth. Her fists were leaking blood. “Have faith in the Beating Heart.”

* * *

In a mountain fortress in another world, Dana Cardinal smiled.   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good luck, everyone! <3


	18. Horrors, Tame and Wild

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for continuing to read this! <3 
> 
> Chapter CWs: Some violence, some body horror

Bruce Banner was nervous.

Or not precisely nervous. It was just that he knew how this would go.  
The helicopter would land on top of the radio station, and Bruce would climb out, and let the Other Guy take over. The Other Guy would save the day, and from that moment on, all of these kids he’d gotten to know and like over the weeks he’d spent cooped up with them would either be afraid of him or ignore him in favor of cheering on the Hulk. Never mind that Bruce was the one with scientific expertise and the ability to form a complete sentence. So really, “nervous” wasn’t quite the right word. “Dread” was more à propos.  
He didn’t want to do this.  
But what else was he supposed to do, say no? No, I won’t help you retake your town to the best of my ability?

Bruce sighed.  
_Not much longer now._

Why did everyone seem to agree that the radio station was such an important strategic asset, anyway? It couldn’t just be John. Cecil. Whatever he _wanted_ to be called. But John was safely tucked away in the fortress, broadcasting already. Sure, he couldn’t seem to get on to his regular frequency for long, but frankly, why did he need to? Whatever.  
Bruce’s job was not tactics.  
His job was to turn into a giant, horrifying green rage monster on command.

The helicopter touched down.

Bruce hated how loud these things were, compared to the Quinjets. But a Quinjet, here, would attract attention where one more yellow helicopter would not. So he did his best to ignore it, and took that towering step to the ground so he could cover his ears over the headset, and followed Natasha and the handful of kids that had crowded into it beside him.

It was Annabelle who was in charge, ushering them to the stairwell in front. Two kids took the elevator next to it as well, and was it Bruce’s imagination or was Night Vale weirdly good about accessibility? But before long, walls obscured the deafening noise of the helicopter blades. Bruce tried to relax. He wouldn’t be transforming immediately, of course. He didn’t want to wreck the building if he could avoid it. But as soon as the kids took over the station, he was to go outside and guard it from Strexcorp’s vastly superior numbers, while most of the kids sniped from inside.

For now, Bruce padded through the dim-lit hallways with a knife in hand. Several of the kids had bows, of one variety or another, and almost all had some variety of sword, machete, baseball bat or the like. But Bruce couldn’t hit the broad side of a van with a bow, and it wasn’t safe to shoot guns in here, so. A knife. Just in case.  
_Who the hell decorated this place? _Bruce couldn’t help but think. _I mean, framed photos of human teeth?_ _Really?_ And the bloodstains, it looked as if there’d already been a battle in here. An old one, given the awful brown color of the stains on the walls, though there was fresher blood still on the floor.

Natasha froze, where she crept up in front.  
There were voices up ahead.

Or at least, one voice.

“Think about it!” the man sounded positively chipper. “The StrexPet™ is specifically designed to give you its all to make you feel better, so you can maximize the productivity of your working hours! And if you start to run late, it will even remind you to get back to work! Its fur is soft and wonderful, its eyes are huge, its teeth reconfigure themselves to match the task at hand. And best of all, the Strexpet™ is powered by batteries, so that you never have to feel_ unfulfilled _because you let it die! Just keep paying us for the batteries, and you will have loving companionship… forever. Strexcorp Synernists Incorporated,” the speaker smiled so widely she could hear it in his voice from here. “Believe in a Smiling God. This has been a message from our parent company. And now, more on our new holiday, called Stay Inside!”

Natasha slipped into the sound booth alongside the Readers.  
Just as well, apparently, because there was something very wrong with the… thing inside. He was leaking oil, for one thing, from glowing eyes and joints and—it looked like oil, in any case. But it turned slowly to face the door, and its face began to peel from its head to let out that deadly light again. Nat lunged, wrapped her legs around its neck—but no matter how hard she squeezed, that throat didn’t seem to yield. She changed tactics, even as the light began to brighten and burn. Instead, she pulled, and pulled, until—

_Pop!_

Black oil spattered everywhere.  
It was like a cartoon. Nat tumbled off the body to land on her feet, a disembodied head in her arms. Oil dripped from its neck.  
Annabelle grinned, and wiped a splat of oil off on the sleeve of her uniform.  
“Nicely done,” the kid lowered her bow. Slung it over her shoulder again so that her hands were free to sign along with her words. “That’s Daniel out of the way. Once we’ve got him and Kevin dealt with, the Shawns from Sales should be pretty simple.” The grin faded. “I wonder why Kevin isn’t doing the thing? The glowy eye thing. Cecil said the Strex people were all possessed or something, with the light that kills, but Kevin doesn’t seem to be.”

True.  
There he was, casting occasional nervous glances at the sound booth but mostly ignoring them in favor of continuing his broadcast. He seemed to be acting… well, normally, if anything could be considered normal in this place. If anything about _him _could be considered normal. He didn’t even seem to _notice _all the blood and oil and grossness on every surface, perfectly content to dip his elbows in red so he could lean forward on the desk. Not that that part seemed particularly out of place, when compared with Kevin as a whole: Bruce began with the describable.

The man was neither tall nor short, neither thin nor fat, with short hair. And rather more prominently, there was the vast catalogue of scars, the burns on his hands, the leg that she could tell was horrifically misaligned even from this distance. But then Natasha got to his face, and that was where the world went haywire: his grin was wider than it should be—hell, it looked like someone had taken a page from the Joker and ripped holes in his cheeks to make the mouth that wide, and frozen it into some kind of plastic smile. And his eyes… Kevin didn’t seem to have normal eyes at all. His forehead was marked by another row of reddened stitches, like John had when they found him, and where the normal pair of eyes would normally sit were two black holes. Not just empty eye sockets, Bruce noticed when he squinted to get a better look. Holes. Into a darkened, empty space that could not possibly be his head.

“They must be taking Daniel in for some repairs,” the host continued, oblivious to the horror of the onlookers. “So I’m sure everything will be _just fine_. Besides, even if something _were _wrong, it’s Stay Inside Day! So make sure not to leave the building you’re in, no matter what. Most of you, I’m sure, will be at work, so you can take this as an opportunity to build up a little extra credit with your bosses! I’m sure they’ll appreciate the help. And remember: look not outside! There will be nothing interesting taking place. Understand? Good.”

“I don’t know that we can kill him,” one of the kids said, shifting side to side on his three feet. “Strex couldn’t kill Cecil. And I mean, Kevin doesn’t belong here, but he’s the Voice of Desert Bluffs just as Cecil’s the Voice of Night Vale, right?”

“Maybe that’s why Kevin isn’t possessed?” Annabelle hazarded a guess. That was… actually a good idea.  
Natasha jumped in. “How long has Strex had control of Desert Bluffs?” she asked, and for once actually managed to sign the question out correctly. “Could Kevin not be—” she let out a frustrated noise. “I don’t know the words. The Erikas said that all souls in Night Vale are sworn to the town, right? And all souls in Desert Bluffs are sworn to their god in the same way?”

Annabelle’s eyes lit up. “Oh I see!” the girl exclaimed. “Kevin might be, might be from before Strex took over there?”  
“Exactly! If everyone in Desert Bluffs is possessed, or bound to the Smiling God or whatever, except for Kevin…”

“So what you’re saying is there’s no _way_ we can kill Kevin,” Bruce said flatly. “Because Strex has way more firepower than we do, and they haven’t managed it, as they obviously want to given that they’ve managed to take over pretty much everyone else in their entire town. What can we do about him instead?”

That took a bit of thought.  
“Maybe we can lure him out?” one of the kids suggested. “I mean it probably won’t work until his broadcast is over, but still. It’s worth a shot.”  
“We need long-term access to the radio station, though, sooner rather than later, if Cecil’s gonna broadcast to the whole town for more than a minute or so.” Annabelle sighed. “It’s worth a try. Besides, while the show’s still going, he probably won’t chase us if we need to retreat. He’s always struck me as a lot less vengeful than Cecil is, as weird as that sounds. He likes cooperation.”  
“So we wait until the weather, and then…”  
_Why the weather?_ Natasha frowned, but didn’t say anything. None of the kids seemed the least bit confused by it. Must be one of the many cultural difference between Night Vale and the rest of the world. She ignored her confusion and proposed an idea anyway. “Could we maybe take out the other Strexcorp employees first? The… Shawns, you said, from Sales? Since that would be a surer thing, and then we’d have a little safe ground to retreat to.”  
A nod from Annabelle. “That sounds like a plan.”

And then a disinterested voice came from the corridor. “Can I help you?”

Every head in the sound booth snapped to attention. There was a young woman standing outside in the hallway, her stance wide, her arms folded. Her head was graced with short, straight black hair, electric blue highlights, and an annoyed expression. “No seriously,” she repeated, “can I help with… whatever it is you’re doing? I hate this job so much.”

“Michelle Nguyen?” one of the kids asked cautiously. “What are you doing here?”  
“What does it look like?” Michelle picked at the badge around her neck. “I was transferred to being an intern here after they bought Dark Owl Records. It’s just… the worst. People keep trying to _talk _to me. And everywhere Kevin sends me is ridiculously dangerous, and it’s like, I can take care of myself? But on the other hand, if I’m gonna do really dangerous things, I’m gonna do them for myself. Not for you.”

“Do you think you can talk Kevin into leaving the station?” Annabelle asked, but the intern only gave a snort.  
“Could I talk Cecil into leaving the station during a broadcast? No. Same with Kevin. He actually likes his job, I think. If there were someone here to take over for him, maybe?” she shrugged. “It’s too bad. I don’t know of anyone else alive that’s qualified, and he’s always, like, really a stickler about that part. He and Strex must, like, agree about that or something. I don’t know.”  
The Book Club members shared an excited glance.  
“Well,” Annabelle finally said. “It might actually work, in that case.” She leaned forward to murmur a few words in the reluctant intern’s ear. “Because Cecil isn’t dead anymore.”

That sparked the first genuine happiness Natasha had managed to spot on Michelle’s face.  
“He’s—” she grinned. “That is good news.”  
But then, inevitably, the intern sobered. “Please don’t try to fight Kevin, if this doesn’t work. He doesn’t have any weapons, as far as I know, but he’s literally… He killed all twelve of the Shawns last week so he could redecorate. With his bare hands. Well, hands, teeth, and tendrils,” she amended. “Still. That’s why I had to take over as intern, is because he murdered the last one. I’m pretty sure it’s actually, like, literally _safer _to go out on assignments for him than to stay in the station? And that’s just not right?”

Nat narrowed her eyes. Since when was “radio intern” a difficult or dangerous job? Was that another Night Vale thing?

Annabelle shivered, as if the idea really horrified her. “Right. Do you think maybe you’d have a better shot at convincing him than we would?”  
Michelle hesitated before answering. “… Probably. Ugh,” she huffed, “I _really _don’t want to talk to him. But if it’s for the war effort…” Her shoulders drooped. “Fine. I’ll give it a try, when he gets to the weather.”

Dealing with the Shawns in Sales was easy enough.

A couple scouts at a time would peek their heads around the doorway with an arrow already knocked, and take the couple-second pause to aim and shoot one of them someplace vulnerable. Strexcorp was obsessed enough with productivity, apparently, that after a minute or so of very cursory searching for the threat, the Shawns (all robotic) just went back to work. It reminded Bruce, ludicrously, of Skyrim—it must’ve been the wind, they say, ignoring the body of their fallen comrade completely. But then again, who knows? By the stories he’s been getting, Night Vale seems weird enough that someone might, in fact, take an arrow to the head because of wind. When the Shawns in front were dead, that was when the Readers (and Natasha, of course) moved along in person. They paired up—one person would go in close, the other would keep an eye out for the movements of any other Shawns to make sure they weren’t caught by surprise. The things were dead—or powered down, or whatever he was supposed to call that state for a bunch of robots—within the hour. Bruce shivered. Unnerving, how efficient these kids were at murder.

The only hostile left in the building was the radio host.

Kevin, he was apparently called.

Bruce couldn’t help but notice the similarities between him and Cecil— if it weren’t for the different arrangement of scars, and whatever’d been done to Kevin’s eyes and mouth, they could have been twins. Even their tattoos were eerily similar. Where Cecil’s wrapped around his skin like vines, crescent-pupiled eyes as leaves along the lines, Kevin’s were of the same design, but with the eyes blacked out and hollow as his real ones.  
He guessed that meant Kevin would likely have similar powers to Cecil, and those were not powers that even all the Avengers together knew how to shut down. That had to be what Intern Michelle was talking about. How else could Kevin have taken out all the Shawns on his own?  
Unfortunately, Michelle didn’t seem to be having much luck with convincing Kevin of anything. Not that he seemed hostile, exactly—rather, Kevin just kept _smiling _in polite incomprehension. And staying exactly where he was. Something he said made Michelle pale, but before she could leave, the radio host tilted his head to one side and snapped out his hand, faster than anything Bruce had seen in his life.

He had Michelle by the throat.  
Somehow, somehow Michelle kept from struggling, even as the Readers stared. Her hands raised above her shoulders, she gazed intently into her captor’s eyes, forcing a smile. Just as strange, she didn’t seem to be falling victim to asphyxiation, either, though her fingers shook from the strain of whatever it was she was doing.

“Put her down.”

Annabelle was the one to step into the recording room, bow at the ready.  
The rest of the team, Nat included, was right behind her. For his own part, Bruce took a deep breath and prepared to call out the Other Guy, because there was no way he could handle John without him, much less whatever it was this not-quite-John had become.

Surprisingly enough, Kevin obeyed.

The intern fell gasping to the floor, her hands flying up to massage her throat, where bruises were already starting to form.

“_Oh?” _Kevin sounded positively _delighted. _“Do you have a present for me?” If possible, that morbid grin stretched even tighter across his mutilated head. “Management usually gets unhappy if I indulge myself too much, you know. They think it makes me less productive! And then they try to _stop _me! Or at least they used to.” Bruce wasn’t sure how he managed to recognize the flash of murderous rage on the radio host’s face—the similarities, perhaps, with that same rage on John? Or maybe it was just that watching someone’s tattoos yank themselves off of their skin with that horrible wet _slap _was simply a universally terrifying experience. At least Kevin’s anger wasn’t accompanied by the incessant chiming that John’s always seemed to have. Instead, there was only a low buzz, like cicadas, or those awful LED bulbs in an office building magnified by a hundred—it was uncomfortable, and loud enough to make his teeth rattle, but somehow not nearly so overwhelming.

“Beams damn it all!” Michelle snapped back at her rescuers. “Now look at him! Ugh, I never should have tried to help!”  
She stumbled unsteadily to her feet, one hand on the wall regardless of the bloodstains. “I bet the old Station Management could handle it. Even Daniel just gets by with being repaired and replaced every so often. I don’t think Strex knows how to take the heat—but you guys haven’t got a chance in hell!” She glowered. “And I _have_ to stay here, because I’m the intern. I am so dead.”

Nevertheless, Michelle Nguyen pushed past them into the hall, leaving the attack force to deal with Kevin apparently on their own. “Good luck!” she called back behind her. “I’m gonna go cower for my life!”

That was when Kevin lunged.

And Bruce let his other self take over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Detailed CWs: Basically, there's a bit of fighting, not particularly graphic. Also, Kevin put in an appearance. 
> 
> See you soon!


	19. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brief interlude.

_Nothing._

They had to have searched half of City Hall by now, and still there was no sign of City Council!   
_Have faith indeed, _Phil Coulson scowled. If _faith _actually had any part in this, he’d eat his own nose. Though if it did, it was probably just as well that Stark and most of the others had gone off with Maria and Madame Winchell to escort the civilians to safehouses instead of tagging along with Tamika. Besides, Stark wasn’t exactly built for stealth. And given that Tamika would rather avoid murdering everyone in the building while they searched, stealth was certainly something they needed.

It wasn’t that everyone here was a Strex drone.

There were still plenty of Night Vale citizens around as well, keeping their heads down and their eyes shut. But the radio had declared today to be “Stay Inside Day”, a new Strex holiday, and the penalties for not participating were awfully harsh. A few random citizens, of course, had joined Madame Winchell in the roving mob from the other desert— but now those sympathizers were gone. The rest were happy to either alert their bosses to the presence of Readers or simply let events pass as they will. Phil glowered. _Cowards._

He hefted his crossbow as he peered around the corner.   
Waited for the Strex drone to turn around to face him, and—the bolt nailed it right in the eye. Dark liquid boiled from the wound, and it began to attack, but then the chemical payload kicked in- Phil had learned that trick from Barton, years ago. The drone powered down without a sound.   
He smirked.   
_And Director Fury used to think arrows in modern warfare were stupid. He probably wouldn’t even have given Barton a chance, if his favorite agent hadn’t insisted on a demonstration._ Phil signaled the rest of his group, and they advanced.

There weren’t very many of them.   
There was Tamika Flynn, of course, leading the operation. Intern Maureen tagged along, and she was a seriously amazing shot with a bow. Himself. Bayani and Maria’s team, who kept their sniper rifles slung over their backs and whose aim was still steady despite a variety of awful burns, though Maria herself was off with Madame Winchell. Phil was _almost _sure he’d figured out a way to shield against it, but—well, it wasn’t anything he wanted to test.

The next room over was their goal, for the time being. Round and cool and perpetually just a little dark and dusty, that was where City Council tended to gather to mutter to themselves and hum for hours on end. Phil peeked through the doorway.

No-one there.   
That was unsurprising, really. The room tended to hum to itself even without City Council, and everyone from Strex or from Desert Bluffs seemed to find it uncomfortable in the extreme. It impacted productivity—and so now it stood empty.   
_Damnit, _he thought. _No sign of City Council, then._

Except—Phil frowned. What was that, on the floor? Small and glinting in the light?

Tamika slipped out in front. The girl poked it with the end of her bow, and when nothing happened, she proceeded to crouch down beside it.   
“Oh,” she breathed. She picked it up gently, almost reverently, gold and enamel on a violet ribbon—

A badge of office.

Maureen’s eyes widened where she stood next to the SHIELD agent. “Oh my shining beams,” she whispered, and Phil couldn’t help but repeat the sentiment, internally. _A City Council badge. That is a City Council badge! _

Tamika’s gaze flicked through all the corners of the room, as if by careful scrutiny she could reveal the rest of City Council giggling in the shadows somewhere. Her face hardened. “Cowards,” the word seemed to echo in the little chamber. “All of you.”

Phil jumped, but after a moment realized she wasn’t speaking to him. Dread sunk deep into his stomach-- who _was _she talking to then? City Council?!? And then she fiddled with the badge of office, and Phil couldn’t breathe, she pinned it onto her own shirt—

** _WHO ARE YOU, WHO CLAIMS TO BE A MEMBER OF THIS COUNCIL?_ **

Oh beams above, that voice wasn’t even directed at _him _and it was all he could hear, all he could _think_ beneath the chiming onslaught.

When Tamika spoke, her words were quiet, and fierce, and the whole world narrowed around them.

**“I am the beating heart.” **

There was a pause.

**“And as such, you need me. You cowards who will not go to the aid of your own body, you _parasites_, you who send the locusts and the plague, you _need_ me!” **Her voice was bitterness incarnate, and rang with something overwhelming, something he had only ever heard from Cecil before now.** “_I_ am the beating heart, _I_ am the lungs that breathe, _I_ am the lips that chant! You want to keep existing?” **her eyes flashed, in more ways than one.** “Then you will let me _do this_, and be grateful! Night Vale is _mine, _and its people are _mine, _and I will not let them go.”**

Shadows boiled like locusts from the badge, coating the gold in a layer of ink that ran like blood through the air. It took everything Phil had to stay where he was, to keep his breathing steady and his legs still.  
But Tamika Flynn was still standing.  
“**Well**?” she glared into the cloud.

And like a shock of lightning, it agreed.

**_COUNCILWOMAN FLYNN. _**The voice sounded exhausted, almost, as loud and overbearing as it was. **_CONGRATULATIONS. _**

“All hail!”

Phil wasn’t sure who said it first, but he repeated the cry like any good citizen, and when the shadows cleared—

Tamika bore a soft meat crown.  
A drop of blood drooled down her temple from one of the pieces of raw steak that made it up. She did not seem to notice.   
“All hail.” **  
**  
  



	20. The Arms of Ghosts We Never Knew

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Dun-dun-dun!*   
The beginning.... of the end. For real this time ;)
> 
> Chapter CWs: none!

The light didn’t seem to hurt the Masked Army nearly as much.

It still damaged them, of course, and killed them if they spent too long beneath its glare. But it took a while. For Janice, on the other hand, even brushing up against it burned her skin, left her seeking desperate shade in Kaphr’s short and curly hair.

She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do here.   
Strexcorp’s headquarters were reduced to rubble. The town as a whole was still standing, but the vast majority of its population had turned into whatever those things were, with eyes that glowed and light that burned and no apparent will of their own. Not that there was anything bad about being subsumed into a greater consciousness, Janice added automatically. It was simply, in this case, unexpected.

_Thrum thrum thrum thrum thrum_

Janice looked up.   
A yellow helicopter was lifting slowly out of the ruins of the headquarters, listing a little to the left thanks to a bent rotor blade. Janice was about to fire on it when she noticed— painted on the side of the door in plain black ink was a stylized eye with a crescent-shaped pupil, wide open and staring unflinching out at the world. Where the pilot must have gotten the ink from, she had no idea, but that was clearly the mark of a Book Club helicopter.

“Don’t shoot!” she cried. Unlikely that the Masked Army knew the Book Club signals. This was a little trickier than shooting imaginary bullets from her fingers, but after a moment’s concentration, she got it. _Bang! _The mortar punched out from her fingertips, straight up in the air. A second later, it burst into a puff of purple sparks.

That should be a clear enough signal.

Sure enough, the helicopter turned and made its way toward them. Janice stayed on her guard—it was perfectly possible that some Strex employee was still piloting this thing after all, and that they’d just painted the eye on in the hopes of making it out more safely. But the helicopter did nothing suspicious, merely turning to land clumsily on the road in front of them, its rotors still beating. The pilot swung out of the door. Brown hair, freckles, and big buck teeth, that had to be her.

“Ashley!” Janice grinned. “Kaphr, could you put me down, please? I’ll be more help back in Night Vale than I will here, I think. Or at least less of a hindrance.”

Without a word, the giant lifted up a deep black hand, and waited until Janice crawled onto zer finger, hauling a backpack and a folded-up electric wheelchair behind her. When the girl was situated, Kaphr knelt to set her down. Stared at her from behind zer mask. Janice hurried to unfold her chair on the pavement, put it back together. After a few seconds, she noticed. Looked back at the Masked Army.   
“Thank you,” she smiled. “You really have been a great help.” A brief hesitation. “Do you… want us to stay in the area for now?”

Kaphr gave a grave nod, and signed something in a language the Girl Scout didn’t recognize. Stood back up. Ze then turned back to the Army and started signing else, the gestures strangely unfamiliar, so Janice went back to getting herself on board the helicopter. They would keep over Desert Bluffs for a few minutes, she figured, and then head back to Night Vale if it seemed they weren’t needed. Hopefully that would be alright.

In the meantime— Ashley, apparently, had commandeered this helicopter on the spur of the moment. A brief medical exam by the Strex employees had uncovered the fact that she was not, in fact, the supposed pilot of the helicopter they’d flown in on, and so instead she’d fled to hide back in the warehouse. When the Strex drones were abruptly possessed, or whatever it was, they’d been about to catch her—but the slower reactions allowed Ashley to sneak back out and to the helipad, and there had been a whole line of them just sitting there, half with the keys still in the ignition, and it was such an obvious opportunity! It wasn’t normally this much of a pain to get Janice into a helicopter. But she already knew that Strex didn’t include any bloody _ramps _anywhere if they could avoid it, so it was hardly a surprise. She got her wheelchair set up, rolled over to the entrance. And after a moment of contemplating the inconveniences of the world, she sighed, stood up again, and got a hand from her pilot.   
“You ready to go?” Ashley signed as she set the wheelchair down with a thump, flipping the breaks with half a thought. The helicopter was too loud to hear anything, but sign language got around that easily.  
Janice gave a thumbs up.

The helicopter began its leisurely rise into the air.

What was the Masked Army _doing_?  
They had arranged themselves in a circle around the headquarters, now that the streets were mostly clear, black silhouettes towering above the rubble of the building.

It was true, Cecil’s odd remark from before. The giants cast no shadows, she could see it clearly from up here. _Maybe the masked army _is _the shadow, _came a thought, cool and dark inside her head, almost like a vision. Janice swallowed. Looking for their god, Dana had said. The Smiling God? Why would they be _looking_ for the Smiling God? Especially when they were hurt by its brilliance too?

_Real gods require blood, _she remembered Tamika saying.   
Something by Zora Neale Hurston, and that woman knew about gods. She’d come to Night Vale, once, so long ago, and Cecil had liked her a lot at the time. Night Vale certainly did.  
There was no blood here, or no new blood at least, beyond that which stained her own clothing and still seeped occasionally from her skin. Only great, black silhouettes and a pale yellow sky, and the tower of sun above. And of course, the chanting. The chanting was new. The helicopter rose, and the sound of voices rose with them, the first sounds she had heard the Army make.

Ashley avoided the airspace directly above the circle out of long-established instinct, and did her best to put some distance between them and the circle. Judging by the ever-increasing point of light showing up in the center of the circle, this was a very good idea, because as the light grew brighter Janice could _feel _it starting to scorch the outside of the helicopter, to heat the air inside.

More distance.   
The light was creeping through the cracks in the door now, the beam of brightness that slotted through the window already causing the floor to smoke. Janice squeaked. She had to avoid the light, she had to, so she unbuckled her harness and curled up in one corner, hugging her bag to her chest in the hopes that it would provide some shade. Shade, shade, where could she hide? And what about Ashley, did the other girl even _notice, _did she know to take shelter from this harsh and murderous light? It had to be blinding her by now. Combined with the chanting, it was dizzying, overwhelming, like eating too much invisible pie in one sitting. She could feel her skin start to tighten and burn, and she could barely hear the rotors anymore over the horrible _chanting _and—

“_Oh,” _Cecil’s velvet voice cut through on her com, interrupting itself in the middle of a sentence. Calm. Dark, and cool, and calm. “It’s _you. _What are you trying to _do_ here?”

That wasn’t Cecil. That was something else, Station Management maybe, and it bared its presumably-metaphorical teeth.   
“Those two are _mine.”_

The world went black.

_~~~_

In Night Vale City Hall, Maria is leading a group of bloodstained and ferocious citizens to the nearest exit alongside the former Mayor. The light seeps through the doorway and pours in from unblocked windows, but it is not as strong as it is elsewhere, and the wards on the building keep much of it out. Nevertheless it flashes, and the people only have enough time remaining to cry out before it reaches them.  
John Peters stands in the center of the fallen crowd, the only one left on his own two feet. “Huh,” he chews on his piece of straw. “Guess I’m the only one who paid attention in 4-H.”

~~~

In the Night Vale radio station, a certain Desert Bluffs radio host goes rigid. The holes in his head which he calls eyes begin to leak, and the stitches in his forehead twitch for the first time in _years_. The light is stronger here, as all things are, but Kevin pauses in his assault and _frowns_. He has not frowned in a very long time.   
“This can’t be right,” he says.

But then darkness erupts from him and he collapses like a puppet with its strings cut.

~~~

Tamika Flynn, for her part, does not notice the light trickling and then pouring through the door. It smokes when it touches her, but she is unharmed, lost in the abstraction of her new city office, and phases into the shadows automatically.   
Her four teammates are rather less lucky.  
Agent Coulson makes a quick realization, and takes the blood from his clothes as power to raise a great slab of basalt between them and the light to cower behind. The light does not make it through.

~~~

Steve Carlsberg’s head lolls back on the dirt of the hole out back of the Ralph’s. He had been half delirious by the time he reached it, but the dotted lines would not lead him astray. When the light flashed, the rest of the huddle dropped—but they are shielded by the tarp and the pavement, and a faceless old woman slips out of nowhere to catch them before heads hit the ground. This is the huddle’s home, after all. And with no eyes in her nonexistent face to see, and a partly insubstantial body to begin with, the light is little trouble to her.

~~~

In the mostly-empty basalt fortress hidden underground, Carlos’s instruments go haywire.   
No-one is around to notice. But the broadcasting room is flooded in shadow.

~~~

And in a desert not unlike this one, Dana Cardinal stands at the base of the Mountain.   
Her feet are planted, her arms folded.   
The light is brighter here than anywhere else, but this does not bother her. She stands in shadow because she says she does, and around her lurk countless tall beings that are not angel. Angels do not exist.

And when the light retreats, she knows that it is time.

“City Council!   
You are the Heart of Night Vale, and I summon you here to my side.” Mayor Cardinal says, and there is nothing for a moment, before a little girl with dark skin and steely eyes and soft, decaying meat for a crown pops out of existence in Night Vale, and into existence here. She still wears the desiccated hand of a librarian around her neck.  
Her presence surprises Mayor Cardinal. She raises an eyebrow, but then catches sight of the City Council badge on Tamika Flynn’s bloody t-shirt, and lets it pass.

“Voice!  
You speak with the words of Night Vale, and I summon you here to my side.” the Mayor calls next, and the creature who appears only loosely resembles a man. Tendrils bursting from his back, tattoos squirming on his skin, a thousand eyes of ink open and watching beneath the shock of violet on his forehead, this is not the man to whom the body belongs. But he is here, and he is _smiling _a small and silent smile.

They stand at the points of a triangle from one another, and linking them now are great, tall silhouettes. The Masked Army of before, with their hands raised and their voices gone, who cast no shadows on the sand; and the things which are not angels, on the inside of it, barely visible at all.   
For a long moment, there is quiet.

“We are here today for one purpose alone: to tear the Smiling God from our home.” Dana’s voice was flat. “Will the leader of its attendants please come forward and speak?”

It was not so much a request as it was a summons. Nonetheless, one unusually small and substantial form separated itself from the crowd of things which were not angels.

“I believe that would be me,” Old Woman Josie spoke.

Her hands shifted slightly on her cane, digging it into the sand. She chuckled, softly, when she took in the expressions of shock on the faces of two out of the three Night Vale representatives. Only Cecil, or the being driving Cecil’s body around, seemed unsurprised. “It’s true,” a gap-toothed grin. “I am an angel. But my name is still not Erika, of course. I was promoted to Josephina a _very_ long time ago_._”

Dana at last seemed to recover enough to ask another question.   
“So you’re…” she hesitated. “What can we do?”

“Well I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask for that, Mayor Cardinal.” Josie answered cheerfully. “You _are_ part of a different whole, you know. Your god is not a smiling one. But you see—” she sobered. “You cannot just rip it out of your world, otherwise we would have done it already. Or you could, I suppose, but it will never stay. Your world is the closest is has to a home, so why would it?”

“Is there some way we could tether it to somewhere else? Get it to stay there instead?” Tamika asked.

“You’re in luck!” Josie’s whole face seemed to twinkle. “It has a home world, and that home world is actually this desert—that’s why there have always been ties, between this world and yours. It just doesn’t remember anymore. But we angels have been fixing this place up for rather a long time now, even longer than most of us have been around, and the Mountain can hold it. Or at least, the Mountain can bind it. Assuming it doesn’t struggle too much. You all will, I think, be very helpful there, especially with your whole living vitality thing making your spells more powerful than anything we can make. And assuming that its actual people still have faith—" she turned back to the Masked Army, and her gaze bored through even the most elaborate masks. “Have you been keeping the faith?” 

The Masked Army bowed as one.

And so Dana let out a breath of what could be called relief, before Old Woman Josie spoke again. “Alright then,” the Mayor said, and her voice was heard through the desert for miles. “Let’s get to work.”   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Take care!


	21. Brightly Burning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yess we're finally here! This is absolutely my favorite chapter of the part 2, so I'm real excited to finally get to share it!
> 
> Chapter CWs: minor gore (pretty vague), eldritch magic

They were not exactly trying to _summon _the Smiling God.  
This entire otherworld and every living thing on it would probably be obliterated by its presence. Or at the very least, scoured down to empty sand and stone, as it had been long ago.

But the ritual was for its sake.

Or at least, that was the impression Tamika was getting from the Niagara Falls flooding her head. City Council apparently knew a hell of a lot more about the Smiling God than they’d been letting on—and no wonder they’d fled, judging by the impression even _thinking _about that thing was leaving in her brain.  
_Ugh._  
But Tamika Flynn stood her ground, and steeled her mind. She knew what Strex was capable of. She’d survived it before, and she would survive it again. Night Vale would survive it again. This Smiling God was no different, even if it was infinitely more powerful, and bright, and beautiful and—_shut up, _Tamika’s second thoughts chimed in. _It had us once, but never again. _It did not belong in Night Vale anyway, or even in Desert Bluffs. Which meant, of course, that all those who _were _supposed to be there already had an edge against it, a little wedge from which to push it away.  
And the angels—the angels! Tamika’s eyes shot open. Angels were real, and they belonged to the Smiling God, from before it _was _the Smiling God!

Old Woman Josie twinkled from across the triangle.

Old Woman Josie.  
An angel. That made sense, somehow, it did not really shock her when she thought about it. _Of course_ she was an angel, she’d been hiding from the Smiling God for all this time in Night Vale, or keeping watch for it, or _something, _and then the other angels flocked to her.

So it was Old Woman Josie who stood in the center of the rough circle, ready to receive its presence. That part was decidedly disconcerting, for Tamika: her body was that of a little old lady, after all, all wrinkled brown skin and wisps of white hair. But Josie’s face was the very definition of serenity, despite the concern even of the Erikas on either side of her, as she held herself ready.  
Tamika barely paid attention to the chanting around her. There was a familiar hum of energy, of course, slowly coalescing into a shield around them. This was the Masked Army’s job, encircling the rest of the participants, and they knew it well. Tamika’s job would come later.

_Snap._

That had to be the shield, settling into place. It felt _almost _like the shell of an active bloodstone circle, like one of the ancient, permanent ones back at base. Almost. It had a lot more movement, though, pulsing in time with the chanting, in time with her heartbeat. And then the Erikas joined in from their rough and flickering circle, just inside the shield, and their whispered words echoed a monstrous counterpoint that set a ringing in her ears so loud she could hear nothing but the chant. It built, and built, spiraling ever higher in fervor and intensity, that asynchronous frenzy of rhythm and sound.

Her lips were moving with the words.

She tried to silence them, to force her mouth shut and silent. Her mouth moved on regardless. It was all she could do to stay rooted to the spot. Squeezing her eyes shut, Tamika pulled her focus inward. _One, two, three, _she thought sternly. _Four, five, six, seven, come on, count, just like that. _She had to get herself under control. This ritual could sweep her away with ease, until there was nothing left of her but chanting, rhythm, and light.

** _Open your eyes. _ **

Tamika jumped. That voice in her head—those voices in her head, they felt so familiar, in some dreadful, deadly way! It was the voice which had challenged her back at City Hall, yes, but also… _City Council? _

** _Obviously. _ **

And then they spoke again, sounding almost bored in their monotone synchrony.

** _Open your eyes. We will keep you anchored. This is a stranger form of magic, but you are part of us, now, and we will not let it take you. _ **

**_  
_**She scowled. _You certainly let it drive you away. _

There was some shuffling in her head, like City Council muttered some sheepish excuse. **_It didn’t drive us away, _**they finally retorted. **_We were just taking a vacation!  
_**Tamika gave an irritable sigh, but opened her eyes regardless. At this point, she was so far over her head, she would have to trust _someone _if she wanted to fix all this, and City Council _was _a largely _benevolent_ overlord. It took several seconds for the bright, colored blotches in her vision to resolve into something coherent.

** **

Mayor Cardinal chanted and trembled where she stood, but her feet too stayed rooted to the ground. A good sign, Tamika allowed, in a new mayor. Perhaps she had some form of guidance as well.  
Cecil, on the other hand, seemed largely unaffected—which probably shouldn’t have been nearly this much of a surprise in the _only Night Vale representative _who had held their current office in full for more than a day. The Voice stared straight ahead, all three eyes open, surrounded by a veil of static that cut through the chanting like a blowtorch through butter. Even as the pressure built, Tamika could feel it from across the circle, a crackling oasis in the very base of her. It was _almost _as anchoring as the new pain in her head. Barely noticeable against the euphoria of ritual, she could feel them still as steel, warm across her chest to hold her back. City Council.

And then the voices took over again, chanting and singing and _writhing _in the sand. There were so many minds inside her, it was so much, _too much, _the world was falling to pieces around her—

Everything fell.

And Old Woman Josie, in the center, spoke.  
“Come on then, you old bugger. Time to go home.”

Josie exploded.

There was no other way to describe it, even if Tamika _was _in any kind of state to describe much of anything.  
She exploded. Blood and viscera flew through the air in all directions, and spattered against Tamika’s face—only there was still something there. A figure, tall and black and elongated, adorned with nothing that even resembled eyes, three shining black rings beside its head. Its wings, unlike those belonging to the Erikas, could not be counted with the way they shifted, coated in crawling writing made of bright black light.

The light now shone a thousand times stronger than before. It blazed down on all those present with an otherworldly _roar, _and the masked army cowered and knelt before it. Even the _Erikas _cringed, though the being standing on top of Josie’s corpse stood tall. Tamika could feel the heat of it on her skin even with City Council’s help, despite the shadows they pressed desperately around her, and it was grim certainty that she held herself strong. If any other citizen of Night Vale had been here, or even any other human, they would be mere streaks of ash on the sand by now.  
But the Heart, the Mind, and the Voice were here, and saved within the shadows of their office. No Smiling God had the power to control them, she knew it instinctually, because their town was still free, and they _were _their town. They would be enough.

Then the Erikas got themselves back under control. They formed a pattern, weaving, dancing, as the creature which had once been Josie stood calm beneath the violent sun. It took Tamika a minute to figure out what they were doing. That was when she realized:_ a net!_  
It was a trap, and as the Smiling God drew down to meet its foremost angel, it slowly lost its ability to slip away again.

Unfortunately, the Smiling God seemed to realize this too.

It screeched, and half the Erikas collapsed where they stood. Fuck! The light shook and brightened, she could _feel _it pulling away, it felt like it pulled her skin right along with it.

And then the radio crackled.

“What… what _happened? _Ouch!_” _

That was not the Voice she should be hearing.

“Wow, listeners, something must have hit my head pretty hard there! I’m not even sure how I got here! This isn’t my radio station. This isn’t my town.” That had to be… Kevin? Whatever Kevin was doing, the Smiling God stopped struggling almost instantly. Instead it was… listening?  
“But that’s okay," the Voice of Desert Bluffs sounded slightly less jovial than usual. "I’m sure everything will work out just fine, so long as we all keep working! I… think it will, anyway?” He hesitated. “But now that I think about it, that doesn’t seem quite right.” Even amidst the chiming of the ritual, Tamika could hear the thoughtful frown. There was something different about Kevin’s voice, something she had never heard before. “Listeners, if any of you know me, or know where I am, or what I’ve done—would you mind coming down to the station? I… think there’s something… wrong.” A quick, heavy breath. “With me.” The Smiling God twitched, and everyone present twitched with it.  
“I think…” Kevin paused. Gasped in another breath. “I think I have to go. So… until next time? Yes. Next time.”   
_No! _Tamika felt the City Council cry. They were so _close _now! Only a few more seconds, and they could—

Everything toppled sideways again.  
The Smiling God was awake, tossing and turning and struggling from the mountain that wrapped halfway around it. It seared Tamika to the bone despite her patch of shade, a marionette on strings of fire—this wasn’t going to work, she realized, they never had a chance! Not with half the Erikas still down for the count. Not with so much of the town unconscious, or dead, or otherwise out of commission. She could already feel the City Council’s grasp weakening about her soul.

This time, it was Cecil that spoke.  
“Stop.”

His command was absolute. Even the light stopped shaking, for a moment, and Tamika gasped as the burning ceased.

“You want me?” he asked. Really, truly _Cecil, _and not just Station Management. Station Management curled in the air around him as a shield, but—it did not interfere. Cecil was free of it for a moment, she could hear as much in the trembling of his voice, see it in the tensed coils of tendons and the way he swayed despite the wreathes of shadow.   
“Then you’d better _fucking _take me!” he yelled.

His voice broke again, the hoarse gravel giving way to squeaks. There were tears on his face, and blood on his fingers, but the Smiling God stilled under that shaking voice. “Just fucking try it!” he shouted. “I know you were trying to get rid of me! You take my friends, you take my town, my _name_, you even stole my mind and memories away from me, but I don’t _need_ your help to get it all back! I don’t need your permission, I don’t need your lackeys, I don’t even need your absence! You have _no power _over me! Because _guess what?!” _Cecil quieted, his words hardly more than a whisper, but they still rang out like cannonballs across the silent sand.

“I’m still here. I am Cecil Palmer, and I’m _still here._”

At that point, the ritual was easy to complete.  
The fortress built into the mountain hummed and glowed, but it managed to hold this great and smiling god regardless. And when the surviving angels stuffed the light inside, the three Night Vale representatives chanted until all those massive bloodstone circles in the mountain were activated, and sealed it off in shadow. There were still pieces of the Smiling God elsewhere, of course, but there were enough angels left to be able to drag them home, when they found them. Even most of the Masked Army had survived, thanks to the magical shields and multi-layered cocoons of their masks and clothing.

“Do not come back,” the angel Josie told them. “Our god will be healing for a long time yet. And when it returns, do not fear, for it will not be what it was.” She cocked her head, and the rustling of feathers eased a little. “Thank you for your hospitality all these long centuries, Night Vale.” A bow. “The others tried, in Desert Bluffs, but—well, it needed time. And I was alone. The Whispering Forest appreciates your hospitality as well, and I expect will continue to do so. It is still too badly injured to return to our god’s service.”  
Dana nodded. She was still dazed, Tamika could see that clearly on her face.

“What about its worshippers?” Tamika prompted. Someone had to ask the relevant questions, after all. “Desert Bluffs worshipped it as their god, and a few in Night Vale did too. Will that be a problem?”  
“Not as such,” Josie shrugged, a complicated motion for something with that many shoulders for all of its wings. “It will only heal faster, with the extra power, and the mountain channels it through us instead of It. We can ensure that It does not escape, or worsen in Its prison. Besides, your people are tied to Night Vale. Their souls are already spoken for, and cannot be given freely to the Smiling God no matter how they try.”  
“And what about me?” That was Cecil, his voice back to the now-familiar hoarseness, something she suspected would never go away. “Can you heal me too? I am so _tired _of hurting, of having to do all this on my own. I just want to go back to what I had.”

The angel sighed with musical clarity. “I cannot. You said it yourself, old friend, you need no help from gods or angels to put yourself back together.”

“And Josie…” Cecil hesitated.  
“Is gone,” spoke the angel, confidently. “She was a happy woman, and lived far beyond her natural years already, Cecil. I will always remember when I was her.” It was immeasurably strange, to see a smile on that elongated and eyeless face. “Like I will remember you.”  
With a final nod, the angel Josie touched the frame of the door in front of them, and light rippled over its surface. When the light cleared, the writing around the edges was changed.  
_So unfair, _Tamika’s mind muttered inanely, _they don’t even have to bleed on these things.  
_“The door will take you back to Night Vale. It is a one way trip, though something tells me you didn’t bring much in the way of worldly possessions.” A pause. “I’m sorry it took so long, to get this dealt with.” the regret was clear in Josie’s voice. “We needed the fortress to be ready, and the town to be strong enough—beams above, if it weren’t for your interlopers, I don’t know that there would have been enough power for the trap. But it is done, and now the healing may begin. The Smiling God was greatly harmed, when this world was turned to ash. I believe it was that loss which rendered it so…”  
“Delusional?” Tamika suggested. “Evil?”  
“Focused.”  
Focused. Right. Like a robot overlord intent on turning the world into paperclips, _focused_. She shuddered. “Whatever. We’ll call, whenever we find bits of it, if we can’t dissolve them on our own.”  
“Thank you.”

And so Mayor Cardinal opened the door back home.

And stepped back into shadow.

Cecil, finally, stood as the last of Night Vale in the Desert, hesitating on the threshold. He let out a breath. “This isn’t over, is it?”  
“No.” the angel Josie’s words were soft. “No, it’s not.”  
And then, sudden as a flash flood—“Did you know my mother?” he asked, biting back the words as though afraid. Shoulders hunched, knuckles white against the frame of the door, yes, he was afraid. The angel answered anyway.  
“She was an odd one. And I cannot say I approve of how she treated you and your—how she treated you. But she knew what she Saw.”

“I think she Saw you, once.”

There was a distinct note of surprise, somehow, on that weathered, eyeless face. “She did?!” Those wings fluttered, rubbed together with a sound like a thousand whispering voices. “I would not have thought—but no, if anyone could have borne it, I suppose it would have been her.” Josie tilted her head. “Now please. Cecil. I love you, but go, and maybe I’ll see you again at League Night someday.”  
Cecil gave a sad and breathless laugh, at that. “I’ll see you, then. Josie.”  
He turned. Paused.  
Left.

The queen of angels stared off after him with grief in her heart. After an interminable moment she let out a sigh, and returned, for the first time in a long time, to her work.


	22. A Ghost of You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wooh! Almost done! 
> 
> Chapter CWs: Minor character death (mentioned)

Tony Stark woke up on the floor of Night Vale City Hall.

Some strange man was leaning over him, complete with scraggly beard, piece of hay, and a thousand-year stink.  
“Oh hey!” the stranger drawled. “Interloper! You’re still alive! Color me surprised.”

Tony groaned.  
His head, god, what even _happened?! _This felt like the worst hangover he’d had since he got blackout drunk at that party right after he graduated. What did he drink, hammers? Anvils?

Worse, he realized after a moment. He didn’t drink _anything. _

_  
_They’d almost gotten out of the building by the time it happened, and fuck, Night Vale was creepy. The mob of sunburned strangers he’d been helping to escort on the way out didn’t even _need _weapons to murder the weird biomechanical robot guards stalking the hallways, they just tore them apart with their bare hands! But a great big window to the outside had been right in front of them, and the locals seemed to prefer that to the thought of using the actual door, and then they would’ve been _free_. Tony had been about to punch through the glass—but then there was light.  
He’d flinched. He was actually sorta proud of that, in a roundabout way. Those few Night Vale locals who had gotten in the way of the light before had turned to crispy black corpses before his eyes, and Tony was not at all sure that his suit would hold up to that. But it still took him ages to get in the habit of ducking for cover instead of trying to just shoot his attacker.

Then Madame Winchell had tried to do something, _started _to do something, only then the world was light and brightness and burning and—he’d passed out. He must have, otherwise why was he waking up?  
At least he was alive.

“You’re the last one back up.” The farmer gave a wry grin. He must be a farmer, between the piece of hay and the straw hat and overalls and all that. “Figured you’d appreciate the wake-up call, if you weren’t dead.”

The last one? But there were still a good dozen people scattered unconscious on the ground, so they must be…  
Tony swallowed._ Oh_.  
“Yeah,” he managed. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” The farmer’s teeth glinted brown and yellow in the dim light. “It’s a good thing we hadn’t made it outside yet, or we’d all be toast. Also a good thing we had Madame Winchell with us, I’m guessing.” He nodded to himself, the motion certain as the tides. That… made a certain amount of sense. The farmer certainly seemed to think that Madame Winchell had done _something, _because his eyes kept lingering on her, and Tony couldn’t blame the man. The ex-mayor stood at the front of the crowd by the window, her entire body rigid at attention. Whatever Madame Winchell was up to now, it made his fingernails itch.

“Right,” Tony murmured. “Great. And we weren’t assaulted in our sleep by Strexcorp drones because…?”  
“They all broke down!” The stranger’s voice was cheerful. “Or all the weaker ones did, in any case. I suppose I haven’t verified the rest, so I don’t really know for sure.” He shrugged. “Anyhoo, we’re about to move out. I suggest you get up and join us. City Hall ain’t exactly _safe _on the best of days, and there’s still plenty a’ fucked up humans to worry about_._”  
“Okay,” he breathed, and that hurt a little less at least. “Yeah.” _Fuck_, his head ached. It pounded in his skull every time he took a breath, and the world spun when he tried to get up. Come to think of it, that was probably a concussion. But the farmer seemed to be fairly understanding, lending him an arm to balance against. After a moment’s dizzy attempts at getting up on his own, Tony took it.

A horrible thought struck him.  
“Hey JARVIS?” Tony’s words were tenser than he would have liked—but come on, what was he even supposed to _say? Hope you’re not dead? _

The reply took a long moment to come, during which Tony utterly failed to suppress his abrupt terror. What if the light burned JARVIS?! If he didn’t get out of the way fast enough, if it fried his helmet. What if—  
“Yes, Master Stark?”  
_Oh._  
A trembling smile.  
JARVIS was okay, even if he did sound clearly the worse for wear. Tony cleared his throat of the sudden knot which had manifested in it. “Tune in to the radio station for me. I, uh, need to know what just happened.” He definitely didn’t let out a sigh of relief so deep it caught raised eyebrows from several locals in the crowd. It wasn’t as if JARVIS had run his house for well over a decade, and secretly been his very favorite AI for most of that time. Definitely not.  
“Of course, sir.”

The voice on the other end of the radio was not John Doe.

“…and my head is _killing _me, though not literally of course.”  
Was that… Carlos? That fidgety Latino guy who wore a lab coat all the time, and who half the Book Club seemed to treat with an affectionate sort of almost-reverence? Carlos the Scientist.

“I don’t actually know what happened.” The scientist continued. “You see, Cecil _disappeared_. He was in the middle of a sentence, but I think he heard something, because his head snapped up and his bosses came out and then he just kind of… melted into a, a viscous black goo. I _really _hope he’s okay.” Tony could hear the tears in the poor guy’s voice even over the radio. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he isn’t. Okay, that’s most likely false,” Carlos admitted. “I guess I’ll just continue on, like the world continues on, and be extremely sad. And, and—and angry!” He burst out. “Cecil would be angry, I know that, and I should be angry too! Cecil should never die, or disappear, or anything. Anyway.” Carlos let out a tired breath. “I heard screaming from the room with all the doors. I ran over there to look—bad instincts, I know, but it was for _science—_and there was a bright black light that burned in the same way that a very large laser burns, and I think I was about to die. Maybe I did die,” the scientist added reflectively. “It definitely felt like I was dying. And I should know.”  
What the hell was that about?

The scientist cleared his throat and continued. “But then I heard a voice, and it sounded like Cecil. It said, it said—it said that I belonged to him, and—oh, I don’t remember exactly everything it said,” Carlos complained. Tony couldn’t blame him for feeling dissatisfied with that—but, hell, if the poor scientist had as bad a migraine as Tony did, memory problems would be inevitable.  
“Then everything went dark, and I woke up.” A pause, before Carlos spoke up again, sounding almost hesitant for once. “I know I’m not Cecil.” Tony could _picture _the poor guy, wringing his hands, his perfect hair mussed and tangled from the fall. “But if anybody knows what happened, would you _please _let us know?”  
There was a rustling from the other side, and Carlos spoke again.  
“Anyway. This is Carlos the scientist, signing off. I don’t know how long this broadcast is supposed to go, though, so… really I’m just handing the microphone to Weird Scout Commander Abdul for now, because there’s something strange going on in the room with all the doors and science dictates that I go have a look. Talk to you later?”

Tony let out a breath.  
_Great, _he thought. _Nobody knows what’s going on.  
_He turned down the volume but kept the radio in his helmet tuned, just in case someone came in with information. Besides, Weird Scout Abdul’s rundown of everybody’s locations and status was useful, incomplete as it was and his gentle Zanzibar accent was relaxing to listen to. How the hell did Cecil always get his information, anyway? When he was running the broadcast, even the troop movements had always been precisely, unnervingly accurate. This kid had barely even pinpointed everyone still assigned to Base Camp.

Nevertheless, Tony followed Pamela Winchell out the window and onto the street.

Abdul over the radio suggested they go to the hospital with anyone who would follow them, to seize any and all Strex prisoners there. Madame Winchell and Maria gave each other a long, considering look.  
“We certainly need the supplies,” the teenager commented. “And anyone we can get out of Strex’s control is a good thing.” One bandaged hand stayed clutched to her chest, but she didn’t even mention it.  
“This is the final push,” Madame Winchell did not argue, precisely, but her fist was clenched tight enough to bleed. “We must focus on cleaning out our town.”

The girl scout’s eyes narrowed. “You do realize you aren’t the mayor anymore, even in name, right? Besides, clearing the hospital _will _get rid of all the Strex guards there. The difference is that we’ll also get the chance to rescue the patients before they can be moved to Desert Bluffs, and the supplies to patch up our own people. And the hospital’s probably gonna be staffed with the most actual people, who we might still need to fight even _with_ the drones down for the count.”  
Madame Winchell paused, considering. “That is… acceptable,” she allowed. “There are other forces, and I understand another patrol is already allocated to the radio station.” Her left eye twitched. “Yes. We shall retake the hospital next. Come along.”

* * *

When Bruce Banner jolted awake, he knew what he had to do.

That is to say, he had a general outline of what he was to do, even if he couldn’t say where from. But there was a frail and trembling human jammed into the corner of the recording booth, fingers white-knuckled on its scalp, and suddenly certainty washed away his fear.  
That wasn’t right.

Bruce picked himself up off the floor, and found a belt for the remaining shreds of his pants. He was the first person awake, it seemed, except for Kevin—maybe the Big Guy was a little more resistant to the light than humans were. Even Nat was still passed out here on the floor. Ugh, and he was already so _sore, _not even counting the bruises from where the Other Guy had burst through the ceiling, or the wounds and red marks where Kevin had gotten a blow in.  
But he had to help.  
What else could he do?

Bruce staggered a few feet forward, and dropped to his knees in front of the radio host who’d tried to kill him. His shin stung where it knocked against the desk, when he’d tried to stand. He ignored it. His coordination was always shot after a change. “Hey,” He tried to smile. Even if the guy didn’t see him, it might help him hear a little friendliness in his voice, instead of just exhaustion. “Are you awake?”

Oh, _shit—_Bruce tried to dodge when Kevin’s hand shot out, but couldn’t move nearly far enough without getting up. Cold fingers dug into the flesh of his shoulder.

“Where is this?!”  
Wide, empty sockets bored into him. “Do you know where I am? I need help. There’s something in my brain, something’s not right, I can’t—” That hand clenched, and Bruce’s shoulder _throbbed. _After a few seconds, Kevin finally seemed to notice it and snatched his hand away, wrapping it around his chest. “Sorry! Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”  
Bruce did his best not to panic, but what the hell was he supposed to do? Kevin was creepy enough to look at even when he _hadn’t _just killed two kids and beat the crap out of the Big Guy! And he was still grinning, despite the distress—wait a minute. This time it was scientific curiosity which overtook the fear, leading Bruce to stare at the radio host’s cheek, still bleeding from where it had slammed against the corner of the desk_.  
__No wonder it looks plastic_, he thought.  
Bile rose in his throat. It actually _was_, that was undeniably an implant holding Kevin’s mouth out in a smile, shining yellow peeking out of the red. _Oh god_. 

“Um,” Bruce managed. Great job. Very helpful of him. “I think…”  
No. He _knew, _the knowledge was sitting right there in his brain, and it stank of the Erikas. “I think you shouldn’t stay here. You’ve done, uh, a lot of bad things while you were… under.” Or whatever it was. Bruce wasn’t nearly so clear on that part. “I’m pretty sure this town would like nothing more than to lynch you at the moment, and I… I can’t let that happen.”

The radio host went unnaturally still.  
And then, in a small voice, he answered. “This is Night Vale, isn’t it?” It wasn’t hopeful, that voice. It was desolate. “And everything’s gone as right as right can be.” Kevin swallowed, and Bruce tried not to notice the scars that covered that tattooed skin, the shaking of those skinny shoulders. “I’d hoped—But you’re probably right,” he admitted. “I need to leave.”

Bit by bit, Kevin untwined himself from that curled position, sliding trembling up the wall until he stood on his own two feet. His back left streaks of ink on the already-stained paneling, and his other hand stayed cradled gingerly at his chest. Bruce didn’t even need to look to tell it was broken, and Kevin almost fell when he tried to put weight on one foot.  
It was kinda weird, come to think of it. Kevin had barely even been touched during the fight. Why was he having such a hard time even walking? The radio host had seemed to already have a bit of a limp before the fight began. Was it the result of some past set of injuries, maybe something Strex had done? And the blood… But Kevin didn’t complain. He took a few quick, violent breaths, and settled into himself.  
“I’m afraid I’ll need someone to help me get out.” That voice was matter-of-fact. “I don’t know where I am, and I’m blind, when my bosses aren’t here. Or the… other one, I guess, the bright one with the teeth.  
“Okay.” Bruce nodded. That made sense. Maybe Kevin’s sight worked like Cecil’s did.   
A twitch of the wrist, and Kevin hurried to interject. “_Please _be careful,” he said. “There’s something wrong with me, wrong with the sentient heat trapped temporarily in my body, and I don’t know how long I can control it.”

It. The Smiling God? But the Smiling God was gone, wasn’t it? _  
_Regardless.  
Bruce Banner heaved in a great breath, and clambered to his feet. He knew why the angels chose him, now, for this. Who else could know, as sure as sure, how this would go?

  
“Trust me,” the scientist held out his arm, and did not flinch when Kevin’s unbroken hand came to rest atop it. “You can learn.”

* * *

Bruce led the Desert Bluffs radio host out into the street, and down a set of alleyways.  
He wasn’t sure _how_ he knew where to go, but he did—and he didn’t have time to worry over it, because the rest of the strike team was starting to stir, and that could not end well. And then he reached it!

It was a door, freestanding by a dumpster that looked like it hadn’t been emptied in decades, scrawled with spray-paint graffiti and an advertisement for the Ralph’s. Old, and oak, and towering, it still emitted a faint hum that squirmed nervous in his gut.  
“We’re here.”  
“We are?” Kevin seemed a little more sure of himself, now. A very little. “Then where is here?”  
“It’s a door.” Bruce let out a breath. “Right in front of you, just one step forward. It should be unlocked.” The other man’s fingers were tight on his arm, as oddly cool as Cecil’s ever were.  
“And… on the other side?”

That was the important part. His voice stayed soothing, when he spoke, relaying that certainty that had been placed in his head.  
“On the other side is a desert, where you will have no hunger or thirst. But most importantly, there will be peace and quiet. So you can learn control, and judgement.” Bruce took the first-aid kit he’d stolen from the station, and pressed it into Kevin’s hand. “Cross the desert. You have everything you need.”

The radio host stood silent.  
“I don’t think I can do this,” that voice was the clearest he’d heard from the man yet, trembling and quiet and achingly uncertain. “I’m not really myself anymore. I haven’t been myself in years, I’ve just drifted away in that horrible sun. What do I _do?” _

The next time Bruce spoke, the words were all his own.  
“You heal.” And then the scientist smiled, genuinely, at this creature that almost killed him. “My situation was different from yours, but I’m sure that part of what I learned still applies. It’ll be hard going,” he admitted, “and some days will be better than others. Some days you’ll still do awful things, and wake up petrified, like nothing you could do can change it. But you’ll figure it out. There’s always a way.” A hesitation, before Bruce made a snap decision.  
“If you want, I could come visit every once in a while. See if I can help. I can always leave if it’s too dangerous, or the Erikas can protect me; and besides, I know for sure I still have more to learn.”

Kevin’s breath let out a stream of heat, and let it hang wondering in the air. He spoke.

“And someday, if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll be me again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... I love the bit with Kevin. Absolutely one of my favorite parts of this fic. Especially right now, the hope for recovery and redemption contrasting with this panicky uproar of a USA I'm stuck in.  
Stay safe!


	23. Do Not Allow Me to Forget You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter CWs: off-screen injuries and a very high Steve Carlsberg

“Quiet.”  
Janice was a Girl Scout. She’d picked up this trick a long time ago, the trick of waking up while staying absolutely still, alerting no-one of her own newfound alertness until she knew if she should. Apparently Ashley had as well, not that whoever it was that crouched above them both seemed to care.  
“I need you to wake up, but I need you to stay quiet, okay? We’re in enemy territory.”  
There was metal underneath her. Very _hot _metal. Not hot enough to explain the nasty, blistering burns on her skin, but easily enough to be uncomfortable. Worse was the steel crumpled over the top of her, its edges jabbing harshly into her skin.  
“I… my leg,” Ashley whispered. She could just barely make out the sounds, on the other side of the wreckage. “There’s something wrong with my left leg, it doesn’t want to move. I can’t feel that foot.”

Oh, that was a good idea. Janice wriggled her toes to make sure she could, but couldn’t keep the gasp from her throat when electric pain lanced up her legs. Her eyes flew open.  
“Janice!” someone exclaimed.

The figure appeared abruptly on the other side of that whole where the window once was, their hands trembling ever so slightly when they reached in to brush the hair from her face. “Janice. You’re awake. What about you, can you move?” Their voice was hushed, and urgent. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’re gonna start waking up.”  
It took Janice a moment to figure out what the stranger meant. And then—  
“We’re still in Desert Bluffs,” she jolted to attention. Hissed. “Beams damn it. We never got out, did we? There was a bright light, and then we crashed.” Her head slammed back against the remains of what had been the seats. “Damn it.”

“Look.” The figure shifted a little. Janice could make out long, smooth black hair, a tan jacket, and a pale wooden longbow hanging diagonally across his body, but not the details of the man’s appearance. That part was almost as frustrating as being stuck here, because something about the man just slipped away like an ice cube in a pan of oil whenever she tried to grasp it. “I can’t get the door open on my own. But if you’re in good enough shape to help, maybe we can shift it. Are you able to move?”  
“I think so.” It took some effort and gritted teeth, but Janice actually had a fair amount of room to move in here, if she didn’t mind getting a little scraped up. “What about Ashley?” she asked. “I need some better leverage if I’m gonna be much help, so you may as well give her a hand for now.”  
“Your friend’s alive,” the man in the tan jacket shrugged. “Her left foot seems to be stuck, but I think I can get her out if I try. I’ll go give that a shot, if you’re still repositioning yourself.” With that, he left Janice’s tiny field of vision again, leaving her alone to rummage.

_Earpiece. Where's my earpiece?_ She had to get in contact with Night Vale. Had they sent someone out for her and Ashley? If nothing else, they would look for her if they knew she survived the crash. Unfortunately, the tiny radio earpiece was no longer in Janice’s ear. She kept looking—damnit. Janice hissed. There was no way it would still be functional, crushed as it was, and she wasn’t willing to bet on Ashley having had better luck. She’d have to astral project, if she wanted to get in contact with Uncle Cecil. Not enough time for that.  
Janice’s face soured further when she found the control board for her wheelchair, split through by part of a blade. Beams save her, she just _made _this one, and it was broken already!

Someone groaned, over the creaking of metal.  
_That must be __Ashley, _she realized. That didn’t sound fun. But then the wreckage shuddered, and the pilot was free, panting in the air. Janice stayed alert, but her little space in the passenger cabin remained intact. Janice relaxed.  
Her upper body was probably her strongest section, so she wanted that to be pushing against the door. Which meant for maximum leverage, Janice figured, she should wriggle up, and over like _this. _Before long, she was wedged in a corner, braced against the door above her. Good enough.

“Are you ready?” The man in the tan jacket reappeared. He wiped a drop of sweat from his temple, leaving dirt and blood behind. “I’ve got your friend putting pressure on her injuries, and I don’t think she lost too much blood. She should live if we get out of this, but that foot is a mess.”  
Janice exhaled. Time to focus. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”  
“On three?” The man took position on the handle of the door.  
“On three,” she confirmed. “One, two—” _Fuck!  
_There was blood in her mouth when she pushed. Janice tried to focus on that, instead of the stabbing pain in her legs. She didn’t know if she was making progress. All she heard was the creaking of metal around her, the panting of breath, until—  
Fresh air!

But then the door moved suddenly, slamming out of its frame and away from the helicopter when the emergency locks finally released it from the rest of the vessel, leaving Janice to wobble half out of the frame. Her legs trembled. _Shit, shit shit! _she thought._ Shitshitshitshitshit—_

Warm hands steadied her.  
“We did it!” The man in the tan jacket grinned, and his teeth were blinding in that weirdly familiar face. “Got anything left in there that you need, or can I give you a hand out?”

_Oh_.

Janice felt herself relax. Or at least, as close as she could get while standing on utterly uncooperative legs.

Not just _a _man in a tan jacket. _The _Man in the Tan Jacket.  
She could see his deerskin suitcase a few feet away, full of medical supplies and laid out on the ground next to a carefully-latched, smaller case. She would be safe enough in his company. “That’s why it took me so long to figure out who you are!” the girl exclaimed, then laughed.  
The man’s face was a study in confusion.  
Janice grinned. “You’re the Man in the Tan Jacket. You saved me, last time I was in the library, when the librarians decided to go through the Romance section and one of them almost snuck up behind me. You shot it right in the eye!”

Confusion turned to revelation, and then to shock. “You—” he choked “You _remember _me?!”

“No.” Janice did her best to steady herself on the frame of the door, but her voice was still serene. “Not normally. I remember you when I see you, apparently.”  
The man’s mouth opened, but he stayed silent.  
Janice couldn’t keep the giggle from escaping. Being stuck here felt much less like a death sentence, now that she knew who it was who’d come to the rescue. Maybe that had something to do with it. “You’ll catch bugs in your mouth if you leave it open like that! Come on, help me down. You’re the one who said we need to get moving. I assume you have a get-out plan, since you’re here?”

The man in the tan jacket moved obediently to catch Janice as she slid down the side of the helicopter, and his jacket was warm and comfortable on her skin. Eventually, he answered. “Uh. Yeah,” he set her delicately on the ground, propped up against the side of the wreckage. “Yeah, I’ve got a way back to Night Vale.” He kept eyeing her through features Janice still couldn’t describe, even with them right in front of her. “You won’t like it. It requires flies.”  
“Flies?”  
The man tossed her a roll of bandages. “Flies,” he confirmed. “So cover anything they’ll want to land on, or it’ll get gross fast. Unless you need a hand with that, I’ll go finish up with your friend. Uh. Ashley, that’s what she said her name was. Sound good? Is there anyone else here that needs rescuing? My vision only showed the one helicopter.”  
Janice made a face. “Just the boarding school, and there’s no way you have enough flies or blood or whatever to move everyone there. I’m just glad not to have to try to walk back. My legs would give out within half a mile, the day I’ve had.”  
“Ouch.” He winced. “I think I’ve got some crutches sitting around somewhere. But that’s something to worry about later, I suppose. Once we’re safe.”  
“Go give Ashley a hand.” Janice was almost done bandaging herself already, though she was mostly just a little banged up. “We need to go.”  
The man grinned. “On it.”

A few minutes later, in a cloud of flies, they went. 

* * *

Bruce didn’t have long to stand and contemplate.

A few seconds after the door closed, fading out of existence, a man’s voice slurred out a sentence from around the corner. “What the _hell?!”  
Shit_. He turned.

Steve Carlsberg slumped against the wall of the alley coming from the back of the Ralph’s, his eyes plainly fixed on where the old oak door used to be. “Was that—did you just let Kevin _go_?!”  
The scientist blinked. He shoved his hands into what was left of his pockets before answering. “Yeah,” Bruce said cagily. “It’s not his fault. And he can’t hurt anyone there. Are you… okay?”  
“Yooouuu betcha!” Carlsberg’s grin was huge and toothy. “Cause I’m, I’m—” he giggled. “You know!”  
“I really don’t.” But then the PTA guy stepped out of the way of the sunset, and Bruce could actually make out details, and—“You look like a rat someone tossed in a cheese grater!”  
“Do I?” The expression turned unsettlingly cloudy. It was a wonder Bruce could even see it, though, between the various scrapes and bruises and sandy dirt that covered the man, the blisters on his wrists, the burns on his hands. “That must be why I told myself to just let it go for a bit. I can’t feel a thing!”  
“Let what go?” Was there another first aid kit somewhere? There had to be, but Bruce couldn’t see any here, and he’d only grabbed the one from the station.

“The drugs, I guess?” Carlsberg shrugged, and his whole body listed sideways. “The people who huddle in the hole out back of the Ralph’s gave me some nicer things, things that turn everything soft. Looks like it puts off the screaming-in-terror stage a little longer than usual, since I’m feeling pretty okay right now.” No wonder that smile looked dopey. The man was, quite literally, doped. Bruce gave an uneasy frown. “The interactions probably won’t be much fun later,” the man admitted with what might have been a wince, “but hey!” He plopped onto the ground as he spoke, as if everything was still about as right as right could be. “If Night Vale isn’t free after a light like that, we’re probably all dog food anyway!”

A long-suffering sigh.  
“Look.” Bruce came up to the man and crouched down to meet his eyes, brushing a bit of mingled mud and blood from that face. “I know you have safehouses here in town. If you take me to one of them, with you, someplace with medical supplies, I can patch you up. Maybe even before the drugs wear off. Okay?”  
Carlsberg’s face was the very picture of suspicion—but then he flinched, and mumbled meek agreement. Disturbing. But at least they’d get to a first aid kit?

Assuming Carlsberg remembered where he was going, that is. It took almost an hour of apparently aimless wandering to find the place, a normal-looking suburban home on a normal-looking residential street, with a ramp up to the door and a spindly and rather dead tree in the yard. The window closest to the top of the tree was boarded up.

Carlsberg’s face screwed up in thought before he knocked out something complicated on the door, and it opened just a crack. A woman peered out.  
“Steve!” she gasped. “What the—it’s Stay Inside Day! You can’t—” Her mouth closed. “Can you give me a number?”  
Bruce had no idea what that was about, but apparently Carlsberg did, because after another long moment he tapped something else on the doorframe. The door opened. Carlsberg tripped and stumbled forward, and the woman caught him, and it was probably a measure of Bruce’s distraction that he barely even noticed that the woman had two mouths and bright turquoise skin when he hurried through the door.

“Argh!” Bruce slammed another cabinet door shut.  
“What do you need?” The woman’s hands were on her hips, as if she didn’t even notice the blood now soaking into her pants. Steve Carlsberg, when he threw a glance in that direction, was laid out on the couch. “Strexcorp drugged him, he has that look on his face. Do you know how to treat that? Because I sure don’t.” Her eyes followed him around the room.  
“No! Of course I don’t!” Bruce snapped.  
“Well, what are you looking for?”  
“First aid kit—”  
“You mean this?” the woman slammed one hand into an unremarkable piece of wall, and a little door sprang open, with a plastic box inside. “Go ahead, interloper. My wards haven’t protested, so I’m willing to bet you aren’t with Strex. Fix what you can.”  
“And, uh, what’re you doing?”  
She fixed him with a violent glare. “Activating the phone tree.”

* * *

Carlos slipped down the hall toward the room with all the doors, his hands clenched, his eyes nervous. Ready for anything, he had to be ready for anything. He stared at the door for a few long seconds, and finally, delicately swung it open…

His heart stopped.

And then—  
“Carlos!” There was movement by the old oak door in the center of the room, someone pushing their way through the growing throng. And then cool arms encircled him, dark skin and fluffy hair and— and he melted into Cecil’s grip, Cecil’s wonderfully immovable grip, his faint scent of raw meat and cinnamon and void. “Carlos, my beautiful Carlos, you’re okay, you’re _okay _and _I’m _okay and I love you, I love you, I love you,” came the frantic whisper, “I love you more than the gods themselves, and they _must_ love you, I mean they’ve blessed you with so much!”  
“Well I can’t argue with that,” Carlos laughed, and he felt breath finally return to him. “It’s certainly a blessing to have _you _in my life.” A kiss, pressed to the other man’s cheek—and Cecil reciprocated, for the first time since that awkward conversation, and kissed him with wholehearted enthusiasm.

Carlos didn't even notice Tamika Flynn and the new Mayor when they snuck at long last from the room. 


	24. The Sound of Trumpets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter CWs: Permanent injury (off screen), minor character death (off screen), mob violence (off screen)

“Ugh…” Phil groaned. Beams, that was unpleasant. His skin felt tight and puffy, like a particularly nasty sunburn, and his _head…_ At least he was alive?

“You’re awake?”   
Phil’s eyes flickered open.   
At first, he could make out nothing but afterimages, but after a few seconds they finally resolved into something comprehensible, if blurry. He thought about sitting up. On the other hand, even that half-conscious moan had been enough to set pain lancing through his head. He stayed down. “I suppose I am,” he answered. _Unfortunately._

Former Intern Maureen popped into his field of vision. It was _obscene, _how cheerful she looked despite her minor burns and assortment of other injuries. “Congratulations! You’re second. I’m surprised, I mean that was a lot of magic all at once. _I _figured you’d be comatose for the next week after that.”   
Phil managed the tiniest of shrugs. “Once a Boy Scout, always a Boy Scout.”   
Already he could feel strength trickling back to him, the shadows he courted in his childhood seeping back in the wake of that horrible light. The shadows would start with the psychic injuries, though they couldn’t do much for the aftereffects of overstraining himself, and then move on to knitting his actual flesh back together. Once he’d had a nice bloodstone-charged gallon or so of coffee and a quick nap, Phil would pretty much be good to go.   
He hoped.

“…Hostiles?” he prompted. It really was nice to be back among Night Vale citizens, who didn’t even comment on the fact that he hadn’t so much as _tried _to stand up.   
“The ones in here are all dead.” Maureen had moved away again, puttering with something off on the other side of the room. “I checked. If we didn’t get them, it looks like that beams-forsaken light did, and no-one else has come to check on this place since then. Aha!” she exclaimed. “Gotcha.” After a moment, the former intern explained. “The light seems to have knocked out our earpieces, since they were more tech than blood magic. But between the earpieces and the bits of Strex bots, it looks like I’ve got all the components for a new receiver—personally, I’d rather know what’s going on out there before we move, especially now that the door’s disappeared.”

“The door— oh.” Phil scowled. “Unfortunate. We don’t really have a way out, in that case, unless we go all the way back through the building.”

“Yeah. Which, y’know. City Hall is dangerous on the best of days, and this is definitely not the best day.” 

There was a hiss from somewhere behind him, opposite Maureen, followed by soft swearing in Spanish. That must be… Bayani? It sounded like him, anyway. “Oh, _ow,” _the teenager groaned. “My legs are killing me. And I can’t feel my feet.”

Phil froze.

“Wait a minute, how are _you_ awake? Aren’t you an interloper?” the kid was groggy, still, though obviously waking up. “That doesn’t matter. Maureen, why can’t I feel my feet? Is something wrong with them?” 

The intern hesitated. That pause was so tense Phil could _hear _it, until at last she answered, her voice wry. “I’d say. You got caught partway out of the shield, it looks like, and your legs got some nasty burns. More than nasty. Um. Both feet, your right ankle, and about halfway up your left leg all looked pretty much hopeless.”   
“…looked?” It was absurd, how calm Bayani sounded.   
The woman gave a sigh. “Yeah, looked. Past tense. We’re going to need all the hands we can get to escape City Hall and wrap all this up, and that’s not gonna happen if we’re all too busy lugging a couple lumps of charcoal around just so we can do the same thing somewhere else. And I’m _not_ leaving you behind, Bayani, your brother would kill me, so don’t even point it out!”   
Phil thought he knew where this was going.   
But Bayani took a deep breath and asked anyway, just to be sure. “You cut them off, didn’t you?”

Another pause.   
“Yeah.” Maureen’s reply was awkward, and uncertainty leaked through in her voice. “Yeah. I did.”   
Poor kid. He was plainly hyperventilating, and couldn’t keep back the choked little sound that escaped. “I-I tried, you know? I tried to get to cover, but I wasn’t f-f-fast enough. I knew I wasn’t! Fuck!” Something pounded into the floor. Probably a fist.

“Bayani—”   
“Damnit!_” _the kid gasped. And then he stilled and sucked in a deep, frantic breath. “Calm the fuck down, Bayani,” he told himself. “This isn’t over yet, and this is _not the time _for a panic attack.” A carefully controlled breath whistled through his teeth. “We will be okay. _I _will be okay. That’s why I threw myself forward with my _head _first, is because I am perfectly capable of regrowing my legs if need be.” Phil did his best to mirror what the kid was trying, slow breaths in and out and in—"I’m a Scout. Regrowing limbs is doable. And even if I can’t, the worst-case scenario so long as I get out of here alive is that I’ll get to have an awesome souped-up wheelchair like Janice Carlsberg does. I am _alive _and I am _conscious _and that is a _good thing.” _ Bayani exhaled. “I am alive.” He repeated himself. “I’m alive.”

The sudden crackle of radio cut him off. “—base camp. We have reports of a flash of deadly light throughout Night Vale, and furthermore we have lost communications, so all units check in as soon as possible with casualty lists and locations.”

It wasn’t Cecil.

It was strange, hearing a voice that was not Cecil on the radio.   
Instead the speaker was plainly young, with a voice that cracked every so often, but mostly chattered on with a gentle Zanzibar lilt that made him unaccountably soothing, if not for the jarring fact that it _wasn’t Cecil. _Still, Phil couldn’t place exactly who it was through the somewhat shoddy connection.   
And then the voice broke off. It came back a moment later, sounding positively gleeful. “Alright everybody! Excellent news! If any of you can hear me, Night Vale has won! I cannot reveal the specifics, but Cecil Palmer has just returned, successful, from the newly-filled prison where the Smiling God has just been bound. And there are others with him: our beloved leader Tamika Flynn, who is apparently now on City Council, and at her side is the new Mayor! All hail Mayor Dana Cardinal,” he continued. “Tremble and obey!”

Phil tried not to snort. “Tremble and obey,” he murmured dutifully. “That tradition really does lose its kick after the first few mayors.”

Maureen didn’t even say the words. “It does, doesn’t it? Alright.” She crouched down at the edge of his vision, fumbling on the ground. “Alive, but still unconscious,” she said. “One of the other kids is dead, though. Uh. I think the survivor’s name is Leo?”   
“It is.” Bayani nodded. He sat up, slowly, the beige and violet of his grubby uniform catching Phil’s eye. “And the dead one is—was, I guess—Lena.” The boy’s attempts to calm himself seemed to have worked, given that oddly detached tone of voice. “Have you given her final rites?”

“I thought I’d leave that to a fellow Scout,” Maureen said softly.   
With a brisk nod, Bayani acknowledged the answer. Phil listened as best he could to the prayer that followed, regardless of his discomfort. It was tradition, after all. Lena’s death had been a brave one.

“Okay.” Bayani said when the rites were finished. The other kid, Leo, had woken during the ceremony and listened with solemn eyes. “We need to check in with Base Camp.” He murmured. “I’m alright at astral projection, but I really don’t have the juice right now. Could anyone else…”   
The other readers shook their heads.  
Phil’s reply was carefully chosen. “I _can_ astral project, in theory. But I’m fairly certain that if I even used that power to make a light right now, my head would split like an overripe melon.”   
“Thank you for that delightful image,” Maureen rolled her eyes. “Same. I can astral project, if I take a few tries, but there’s no way in hell I have the energy to do that _and _cut through whatever wards you’ve got on the camp. Since, y’know. I’m not part of your group.”   
“Right.” Bayani deflated. “Have we got some bloodstones? Or is there a built-in circle? Maybe if we pool our power…”

Now _that _he could help with.

Phil sat up with the sort of ginger caution usually reserved for brain surgeons. It helped, a very little, but he still couldn’t keep the groan from escaping. Ugh. At least the rest of this was all small motions. “I—ah! I actually have a set on me. My set.” He fished out a lovely wooden box from his pocket, dark brown wood with intricate runes on the surface made to look like the twisting of vines. He’d inherited it from his mother, upon her conscription, and smuggled it out with him when he left. “Don’t break them.”

* * *

Tony Stark, billionaire inventor and semi-professional superhero, felt superfluous.   
Night Vale had one hell of a lynch mob. Under Pamela Winchell’s whip-sharp direction, it had barely even taken the crowd an _hour _to retake the entire hospital. Strex officials were murdered out of hand, collaborators penned in in the sixth floor waiting room, and necessary hospital staff were given strict instructions to stay at their posts and keep working until the collaborators had been dealt with. An army of spiders in nursing scrubs and lab coats came out of the walls, too, to take over from the human doctors, and nobody even seemed surprised. Tony considered trying to calm the mob down, keep them from killing anyone else—but one look at the murderous rage in Madame Winchell’s eyes was enough make even him too nervous to intervene alone. _Besides, _he thought guiltily, _most of them are robots. _Never mind what he’d do if anyone did something to JARVIS and then justified it like that. Or Friday. Or even the likes of Dummy, that were barely smart enough to be general AIs in the first place. 

“Stark!” That was the former mayor.   
Tony snapped to attention from where he wavered at the back.   
“Unholy Scout Maria has bandaged her hand and found a radio she could repair. Give us an earpiece connected to it and you’ll both have my permission to leave.”   
God, why was he even waiting for permission? When Tony glanced around, he spotted the Girl Scout off to the side, working at a side table with a pile of wires. “You got it,” he answered. “Give me five minutes.”

“You too, huh?” Maria muttered as he approached. “I’m not needed here.”  
“Yeah.” Tony gave a sigh. “I thought the Book Club would wanna keep an eye on this whole cleaning out the town thing, though.”   
She shrugged. “There were some scouts coming through from the desert, I gave them a quick briefing. And it won’t matter much if we can get the radios back online, assuming someone’ll be back at base to coordinate.”

“Sure.”   
Between them, fixing the radio and connecting it via Bluetooth didn’t even take the requested five minutes. Tony found himself amazed by the girl’s skill, for someone who claimed she’d never really done much tech stuff—and when asked, she didn’t even seem to want to admit where she learned it. I mean, Emily Dickinson poems? Bullshit.

“…before I take you to our first status update since the light that knocked out our communications.” The radio was… reassuring, somehow, even without Cecil on the air. “Strexcorp declared today to be Stay Inside Day.” Hell, Tony could _hear _the scorn in that young voice. “But now—the light’s gone, people. I’m not about to promise that it’s safe, but our town is never safe. It’s ours. What I _will _say is that Strex? Strex is over. So if you want them gone too, get out on the streets and help us!”   
Tony let out a breath. “This town…” he shook his head. “This town is _fucked up_.”   
Maria snorted. “All the interlopers keep saying that. I still don’t really get why.” She stretched her arms out to the side. “Come on, after something like that light I guarantee they’ll want everyone to check in.”

“How do you mean, check in?” That was one thing Tony had certainly learned here. Always double-check that the locals were thinking of the same process he was unless he wanted to risk being roped into blood magic or something, without even knowing beforehand—like that movie with the accidental betrothal to an alien.   
“Astral projection, usually.” The girl shrugged. “I’m sure Madame Winchell can handle it, if I let her know. But if we’re leaving her, uh, her unofficial unit, we should check in on our own and ask for recommendations of what to do next. Assuming you’re coming with me?”   
“I guess? I may as well, if it would help anything. And frankly, I just want to not be helping a torches-and-pitchforks mob go around killing people.”

Maria winced. “It might be a little… harsh, I admit.”   
“It’s murder.” Tony’s voice was flat. “I don’t think I can stop it, and I’m sure the victims—most of the victims—have done horrible things, but it’s still murder.”

“The town has to protect itself.”   
“With the _indiscriminate murder _of anyone from another town who caved to Strex and started working for them? As the former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I promise you that plenty of those people wouldn’t be working for Strex if they had a choice, even if it were just a normal company instead of a, a, a cult or whatever the fuck it is.”

There came a sigh. “I _know_.” Maria’s fingers clenched, but she did not look up. “They’re definitely getting… carried away. At least most of the actual Strexcorp employees from Desert Bluffs that have ended up here seem to be the most… devoted, I guess, to their cause. The most evil. But it’s still against the Girl Scout Law, this kind of justice. ‘Responsible for what I say and do’? ‘Respect authority’? We’re supposed to hold the Sheriff’s Secret Police and Mayoral death squads as the only legitimate authorities, and members of a crazed mob can’t be responsible for anything in the first place! But with the Secret Police still Strex-owned and in disarray, it’s not like they’re going to step in—and if Cecil comes back on the radio, I’m not even sure if he’d calm them down or fire them up. I certainly can’t do shit to this many people.” Maria finally met his gaze. “It’s supposed to be the Mayor’s job, but…”

“But Madame Winchell’s not the Mayor anymore.”   
“Exactly.” The scout’s head tilted, just briefly, to the left. “She’s gotten sucked into the bloodlust too.” After a long, uncomfortable moment, Maria continued. “There’s nothing either of us can do except get out of here. Close our eyes, pretend it never happened, and then go home and drink to forget.” 

Tony found himself speechless at that. She couldn’t be older than, what, sixteen? Eighteen? But even aside from the fact that there was no way in hell Maria was old enough to drink, she sounded so _certain, _so _tired—_God, what was _wrong _with this place? Maybe it was just cynicism from this whole war with Strex, but… still.

“Come on.” The scout straightened. “We’ll go find a bloodstone circle so we can check in with the Base Camp, and see if there’s something else we _can _do. Okay?”   
He hesitated. But… he was still an interloper. He’d have even less luck talking down a mob than Maria would, he _knew _that.   
“Okay.” __  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update! Take care! <3


	25. For All the Ends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, this is an unusually long chapter! But it's the last, except for a short epilogue I'll post in a little bit.
> 
> Chapter CWs: Some fighting, and a little eldritch magic.

“…the _LIBRARY?!”  
_It took herculean amounts of effort not to yell. Yelling, Janice knew, would be a _very bad idea. _“You say it’ll take us somewhere safe, and then drop us in the _Library?!” _

The Man in the Tan Jacket sighed.  
“Saf_er _anyway. But it needed to be somewhere that wouldn’t be disturbed, and it’s not like I can rent an apartment in the Barista district. I tried, you know. The landlord forgot I was there, moved my stuff, and rented the place out after the first week.”

Janice groaned. Those excuses did make sense, at least. No way would a bloodstone circle as complicated as this manage to stick around in an actually public place, not with the fine chalk spell diagram latticed all around it.  
“Look, we’re right next to where I’m staying, okay?” he continued. “The librarians don’t even come here very much, and they can’t even tell my actual room is there—I converted one of the catalogue offices and put a notice-me-not spell on it, I’ve always been good at those. I’m sure I’ve got a wheelchair in there somewhere.”  
Ashley’s strained laugh sounded like the adrenaline of the helicopter crash was definitely wearing off. They had to get somewhere safe, _now, _and Janice said as much.  
“I know!” The Man in the Tan Jacket snapped. “Trust me,” he hauled Ashley up with one arm, leaning heavily against the extra weight. “I know.” He looked from Janice to the bow in his hand and back again, and deflated. “Can you walk a few meters on your own?”

“Normally, yes, but not right now.” Janice bit her lip. _Damnit_. “Go on without me, and come back if you can for a second trip. As long as I’m not found, I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not leaving you.” It wasn’t even an argument, just a statement of truth.   
“I don’t need to be a burden!” Janice hissed. “I have a gun, I have my magic, I can handle myself.”  
“But if the librarians come in a group while you can’t run away, you’ll die! _Nobody _can handle a whole damned pack of them.” Now it was the Man in the Tan Jacket who was nearly shouting. Fortunately, he seemed to realize it, and forced his voice down to a whisper. “Janice Carlsberg, you are the closest I have come in _years _to someone who might actually remember who I am for more than ten minutes at a time. I _will not _leave you to die in the public library, even if there is a chance you’ll survive until I get back.” One handed, he unstrung the bow and slung it over his back. “Come on. Lean on me and I can drag all three of us back to my little hidey-hole, especially if you handle defense on the way.”  
That… was not the worst idea she’d ever heard. Janice grimaced. Even if she hated being carried around like a ragdoll, he had a point. She was a good fighter, yes, able to take down an entire two or three librarians on her own on a good day. But this wasn’t a good day, and she’d already lost more blood than she should.

“Please?” the man murmured.  
“…Fine.”

Slow and trembling, Janice pried herself to her feet, bracing bloody hands against a bookshelf. The Man in the Tan Jacket reached toward her, and she took a careful step—her knee buckled.

“Oof!”  
“Sorry.” Janice mumbled against the cool of the trench coat. It smelled nice, if faintly coppery. Certainly it was more comfortable than the floor. “Thanks for the catch,” she grumbled. “Again.”  
Between the two of them, Janice managed to scoot her legs a little closer and stand up straight long enough for the Man in the Tan Jacket to loop an arm under her shoulders. That made it easier. Step by stumbling step, the trio staggered through the stacks.

* * *

“Right.” Cecil was the first to break away.  
It stung, a little bit—but Carlos knew that look. That was his _things are happening and I need to broadcast _look, and though the timing was annoying, it was comforting to see that he still had that sense of urgency.  
“Carlos.” Those beautiful cold hands fixed themselves on either side of his face. “Dr. Carlos Ramirez, love of my life, best scientist in the entire universe—you deserve to have everything you want for, every_one _you want. I cannot give you Cecil as he was, only as he—as _I _am, now. I am not healed. Wounds such as these will not vanish in a night. They may not vanish in a lifetime.”

For the first time since he’d returned, Cecil’s ensuing smile was confident, even if it was a little shaky.

“But though I am scarred, I am whole and I am _me, _and Carlos, I adore you with every molecule of myself.” Cecil paused. His mouth opened, then closed, as if he hadn’t quite realized what he was saying. He continued. “A-anyway. You’ve been so wonderfully patient with me for so long. You don’t have to stay, if you don’t want to. I’ll keep doing my best to heal either way; and eventually I know it will be enough, _I _will be enough—I mean, I’m all I have.”  
Another hesitation, and Cecil’s thumbs rubbed gentle circles on his cheekbones.  
“So I guess all that’s left is the question.” For once, Cecil’s eyes were fixed on his actual face, their foreheads pressed together. “Carlos… You know how I feel. Do you still—” he broke off, and resumed again in a whisper.  
“Do you still want me?”

Carlos did nothing to restrain his grin. “Cecil, you adorable man. Of course I do.”

When Cecil’s eyes fluttered close, he could _feel _the bliss radiating off him. Even just breathing here together was glorious, it felt like a boat coming into harbor, gentle and grounding and safe. But—all things come to an end. Cecil pulled away, and landed one last kiss on the tip of his nose.  
“Good.” The radio host twined their fingers together, and that was something. A shy smile. “I need to take the station back. Station Management should be able to give me some more space in my own head if they have somewhere else to be.”  
“And you’re getting antsy.” Carlos raised one eyebrow. Yes, he knew that look.  
“…and I’m getting restless, yes,” Cecil admitted. “I need to broadcast. Even here in Night Vale, there are people in need of search and rescue, and people who can’t be rescued anymore, and—” he blinked. “Oh. Janice is…” There was another blink, and another. That must be the visions, now that he was back in city limits.  
“Cecil,” Carlos prompted.

After a few more seconds, the Voice responded.  
“…Yes, Carlos?” He sounded a million miles away, and Carlos smothered a laugh.  
“Are you sure you want to go all the way to the station first?” Whatever happened in the desert otherworld, its aftereffects had to still be going. If nothing else, there still had to be Strex employees wandering the town, and apparently there was some sort of deadly light thing that didn’t make it to the underground base camp.

“I…”  
The streak of white in Cecil’s hair was wider than it used to be. Carlos combed the sand from it with his fingers as he waited.

“I’m not. Sure. Um.” Cecil shivered. The smile gone from his face, Carlos noticed with a pang of sadness. The Voice’s eyes still flicked from one side to another, the third one on his forehead slipping open just a crack. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“We’re pretty far away from the radio station.” Carlos explained, keeping his voice and hands gentle. “If I lead you to the radio setup here instead for now, will that work? It sounds like you need to do your broadcast sooner rather than later, and staying here would be a lot quicker.” He gave his boyfriend a few seconds to digest the words, and it _looked _like he was getting through. “You’re also kinda out of it right now, and there are still Strex employees on the streets, so leaving the base camp would be pretty dangerous.”  
“I… yes,” the answer was surprisingly definite. “Yes, broadcast now. Would you…”

“Of course.” Carlos squeezed his hand in his own. “I can lead you there. You just hold on to me, love. Alright?”

And they were off.  
Cecil could get there on his own, if he needed to. It was fascinating, actually—the third eye in his forehead wasn’t even an _eye, _in the traditional sense of the word, but it picked up color and outlines just like a real one. A lot of the time, he could even use it as such! Carlos was dying to know how it worked. Unfortunately, it also opened Cecil up to visions and influence from Station Management a lot more than he was otherwise—especially when he was in Voice of Night Vale mode as he was now.  
This arrangement was much less alarming for everyone.

Before long, they were at the makeshift radio station.  
The boy at the microphone trailed off when he saw them, but picked up the broadcast again with a lightning grin. “And with that,” he chirped, “it looks like my time here is done! On our little radio show, I mean, because Cecil is here with his scientist on his shoulder, and I’m sure he’ll do a better job than I will. I’ll see you all on the other side!”  
He darted away.

And Cecil stepped in, as smooth as silt. He hesitated—

“Listeners.”

Carlos withdrew. His hands gravitated to his arms, rubbing anxious at the skin.  
It was uncomfortable, watching Station Management seize control like that: First Cecil tensed, and his eyes closed, and the thing on his forehead opened. Those fascinating tentacles oozed across his skin, though they stayed locked in their tattoo form, and Carlos could have _sworn _they sucked every drop of light out of the room and into their folds. By the time Cecil opened his mouth, there was nothing left but shadows.

“Listeners, I am returned from the desert,” he intoned. “Returned—not to a fortress or a town, but to the beating heart of the beast.”

Something soft and cool caught the scientist’s hand, and he jumped. “Ceec?”

Cecil kept speaking only to the microphone, but pressed a kiss to his knuckles when he paused for breath. “At the heart, the troops are ready. Aid them when you see them, Night Vale, for they are the blood in our veins.”

Carlos smiled, faintly, when his fingers were released.  
“Your Mayor will be on her way soon, for she is needed, though she has delayed her work as best she can. As for those Strex officials you are bound to come across—” that voice turned frosty, and Carlos bit his lip to hear such rage. “I cannot tell you what to do to them; only that they, if anyone, are interlopers here.”

The kid stood at his elbow. “Carlos the Scientist. Would you mind staying with Cecil? It sounds like the rest of us’ll be moving soon enough, but if you head over to the tactics room with me, I can get you briefed. You can tell your boyfriend what he needs to know from us, we can hurry up and help people.”  
That… sounded like a good idea. “I guess, sure? I mean I’m happy to leave him alone for a bit, he’s perfectly capable on his own, if you’d rather…”  
“No thanks.” The scout snorted. “Anything I can do to avoid accidentally ending up an intern is appreciated. Cecil’s not about to send _you _into danger, and I don’t know that even Station Management could keep control over him if they harmed you.”

“Fair enough.” Carlos’s lips quirked up in a smile. “Lead the way.”

His smile faded a little when they approached the tactics room. Full of people and honey-warm light—and the sounds of bickering.  
“Mayor Cardinal, before I go—please. Please step in. This isn’t right. It’s going to be a slaughter!” Maria pleaded. There was an odd ringing to her voice, which made a lot more sense when Carlos stepped inside and saw her body was translucent. Ah. This was astral projection, then. He still hadn’t gotten the hand of it, himself, but it was also one of the skills that not even everyone from Night Vale could do.

Dana—Mayor Dana, Carlos corrected himself—sighed. “I’m needed here too, you know. But Cecil said it, so I suppose I have to do _something, _and Desert Bluffs will soon be my subjects too if all goes well.”

“Speaking of which—” Tamika’s voice was more quiet than usual. Withdrawn, almost. “We still have people in Desert Bluffs. In the camp. It’ll take time to get some helicopters in the air, so in the meantime, Maria, Desert Bluffs is your assignment. Stark can fly. Take him with you, and go see if there are survivors you two can free—and keep an eye out for Janice and her pilot while you’re there, got it? I’m told she went there to start a distraction when I got captured, but no-one’s heard from her since the light hit.”  
A salute, and Maria’s image faded away.

“Carlos Perfecto?” That was some bright-eyed kid he barely recognized, bent over the table in a Boy Scout uniform. “Are you taking over getting Cecil a briefing?”

It took several seconds for Carlos to sidle over there, in the hubbub. The bloodstone circle flared up again with another Book Club member checking in, Dana Cardinal made her way out of the room—it was a mess.  
“I am, yeah.”

“Then I’ll go over the signals for you.” The kid pressed an earpiece into his hand. “Plus, you get to report any major new developments back to us when we leave, especially anything Cecil doesn’t immediately spout out on air. And there might still be people checking in via bloodstone circle, too. Listen carefully!”

He did.

* * *

Natasha woke to a pounding headache and the familiar thump of a body hitting concrete at high speed.  
“You _dare—” _someone hissed, “You dare profane our Smiling God, you _dare _attack Its most loyal servants—”

She did not open her eyes. Not yet, not when she didn’t know where or who her enemy was. But then, there was croaked reply that followed sounded like Annabelle, if the girl was struggling to heave breath after futile breath into her lungs. “Lauren Mallard. Do you realize I can’t actually hear a word you’re saying? If you want to intimidate me, it’ll have to be in a language I can perceive.” Her voice choked off, all of a sudden.  
“You don’t _need _to understand my words.” That gooey fake-politeness was back, churning uneasily in her stomach. “All you need to do is _die, _and I will make of you such an offering—“

_ Enough._

Natasha lunged to her feet and toward those voices, and all three of them slid to the ground in a bloody heap. Lauren Mallard snarled through her black eye like a feral thing, and then they were fighting. Wrestling the Strex woman under control was harder than Natasha thought it would be—certainly harder than the Shawns or any of Hydra’s goons. It was actually kind of fun. Mallard had some kind of hysterical super-strength thing going on, but Nat had grappled insanely strong people before and won. And Annabelle, too, was surprisingly capable—not assassin levels of capable, but the girl was certainly stubborn beyond belief.  
There was something impossible about Lauren Mallard, though. By some stroke of ill luck, the woman managed to pin her down, and those hands burned like the horrible light right through her armor, and Annabelle was still gasping for breath through broken ribs and—

The woman screeched, and lurched backward. 

“Fuck! Off!” someone yelled.

A familiar silhouette slouched in the doorway. Natasha could have laughed in relief, if she had the breath. Reinforcements were here!

Michelle Nguyen stood still for only a minute, grasping something in one rust-coated fist when she stepped forward. Lauren Mallard’s eyes were fixed on her. “Interning under _Cecil _would have been safer than doing the same under you!” Michelle snapped. “At least _he _lets his interns play whatever music they want! And doesn’t play the most boring, mainstream drivel on the radio, even if it still isn’t remotely close to being in good taste!” She ripped the woman off of Nat with a grunt of effort. “And most of all, _Cecil _doesn’t try to _murder _everyone who disagrees with him! So FUCK YOU!” Michelle screamed. Her fist came up, then down, slamming whatever it held into the former manager’s mouth.

Nat felt a humming under her fingernails. She glanced over to Annabelle—those eyes widened. “What do you need?” Natasha signed.

Lauren Mallard was sent toppling, and Michelle flung herself to the other girl’s side. “Emergency transport,” the intern babbled, her hands shaking as they translated, “come on, we need to activate it—”

Nat did not know magic.

She just didn’t.

But she did know that Michelle must have shoved whatever it was in that unhinged woman’s mouth for a reason, and it should probably stay there, and also that Lauren Mallard could not be allowed to gain the upper hand. So she stopped paying attention to the conversation, and _lunged. _

Teeth dug into her hand. Lauren Mallard thrashed beneath her. But a few seconds later there were stones surrounding the edge of the room. Michelle took out a smooth wooden amulet from around her neck, and it glinted distractingly in the corner of her eye. Annabelle traced something out in blood, and there were words like overwhelming static, and—

And Lauren Mallard vanished.

The tile was blessedly cool under Natasha’s back. She heaved in breath after gulping breath, staring up at the ceiling, until—“Is she gone?” she managed.

When Nat looked up, Michelle had slid down to bury her head in her knees. The intern trembled so badly Nat could _see _it.

“Michelle?” Annabelle prompted. The Reader was winded, yes, and clutching at her ribs, but not nearly so shocked. She had already hauled herself back up and started checking on the unconscious kids still scattered about.

Michelle swallowed.  
“She’s gone. We… the interns. We’ve been planning something like this for a while now. One by one. Passing it on, to whoever takes the dead intern’s place.” A great, shuddering breath. “I only had it for three days, before… before all this. It’s a modified emergency transport charm. I don’t know where it’s set to. Not here. Not Night Vale. Far away. It was all we could do, she’s healed all her wounds before. Apparently.”  
“It was Nulogorsk,” Annabelle interrupted. “I could smell it. The snow. The ash.”

And then the girl scout let out a tight breath. There was something tense in that demeanor, some fear locked up tight enough that even Nat could hear it. “We’re missing people.” Annabelle signed, and her hands trembled in the motion.

“We’re—” Natasha broke off.  
“Dr. Banner’s the one I’m worried about.” The girl scout bit her lip. “But just as importantly—where’s Kevin?”

Michelle turned pale. “Oh _fuck.” _

But then a buzzing came from the intern’s pocket, and she took out a cell phone with a harried grimace.  
“Hello?” Michelle’s face tightened.  
“What?” Her voice was curt. “No, I’m—it’s fine. You do realize I’m not actually part of the PTA, right? I’m still not sure why I’m on your phone tree. The station is clear, as far as I’ve seen, and Lauren Mallard is dealt with. I’ll pass it on, last ditch effort, got it. But has anyone seen Kevin?” She paused, and there was some conversation on the other side. Michelle hung up. She was already typing something into her phone, as if she didn’t even notice the growing silence in the station, the terror lining every inch of those listening, bloodstained walls. And then, finally:

“Kevin’s gone.”

Natasha sucked in a breath. “Dead?”

Michelle shook her head.  
“I don’t know,” she muttered, fingers flying across the screen. “Not a threat anymore. That was the PTA phone tree. They have Steve and your interloper buddy, they’re the ones who activated it to begin with. Steve Carlsberg and Dr. Banner are both safe in PTA territory somewhere, I guess. Now shut up, I need to pass the call on.”

Annabelle’s bloody hands massaged her scalp.  
“Right.” The kid heaved a sigh. “The others aren’t awake yet. Someone combat-capable needs to stay here in case things go wrong—Michelle—”

“I’m not part of your lame club.” The intern rolled her eyes. “Even if you people _are_ trying to help.”  
“Fine,” Annabelle growled. “Agent Romanov, I need to call Base Camp. Would you stay here and keep an eye on everyone for a while?”

“I… yes.” Nat rubbed at her face. “Yes. Go. Do your magic. Maybe Michelle here can help me get ahold of some more medical supplies, and I can start patching people up.” She had a lot to think about. “They’ll be safe with me.” 

* * *

Maria sat down with a _thump. _

“I think she’s coming.”  
“Who?” Tony didn’t bend over to help the girl. She probably would’ve bitten his head off if he tried; and even he could see she was just tired.  
“Mayor Cardinal.” Maria rubbed at her eyes. “I think I managed to convince her. Or Cecil did.”  
“That’s… good, right?” he hazarded. He hoped so. They had enough bad news already.

“I think so. She won’t be as caught up in the bloodlust as everyone else, at least.” The scout sighed. “Base Camp didn’t say what I should do, either. But Janice sure wrecked some serious chaos over in Desert Bluffs. To be honest, if you can get there—that’s probably where we’re needed most.”

“Isn’t that still enemy territory?” Tony frowned. “I mean not that I have a problem with that, it’s just… y’know. More dangerous.”

Maria shrugged. Shaky fingers twisted a lock of hair that had escaped her braid somewhere in the chaos, now covered in dust and dirt. The burned hand stayed in her lap. “Yeah, well.” She sighed. “Night Vale has people there. Someone needs to get them out, and we can’t just leave Desert Bluffs to fester and die. And I’m increasingly sure that a lot of its citizens weren’t exactly acting under their own will for Strex in the first place. I’d rather it be us who comes to deal with it than—well, you know.” Her gesture encompassed the whole seething mob outside the broom closet where she’d hid to contact base camp. “And Janice and her pilot made it back to Night Vale, somehow. She says she’s safe, but won’t tell anyone where and how she got there. Or maybe people just forgot?” 

Tony swallowed.  
“Good point about Desert Bluffs,” he admitted. “Besides, I can probably get there faster than just about anyone else. My armor’s still got enough battery, it’s not like I’ve been doing much top-speed flying anyway. Carrying one extra person shouldn’t be a problem.”  
Maria let out a deep breath, and buried her head in her knees. After a long moment, she looked up. Hauled herself to her feet.

“Okay.” She took a moment to just breathe, weight settling back in her feet like she wanted three-year nap. Tony empathized. “Let’s go. Are you ready?”

“Ready enough.” Tony wasn’t entirely sure where the exit was. This place was a maze, even for a hospital.  
He mustered up a smile. “Lead the way.”

* * *

With Bayani safely ensconced in the house of some chipper PTA parent, Phil Coulson felt himself relax at last.

“Thanks again,” Maureen’s voice was dull and exhausted. Her own wounds had been properly cared for, _finally, _but he could still see the pain in her face. “It sounds like we’re mostly done with this stupid war, but—well, I’m sure the two of us will still be needed somewhere.”

“I’m sure.” The man in the doorway regarded them gravely. “Before you go—” Those fingers clenched on the wood, leaving deep grooves where they dug in. “What about the kids?”

All that relaxation was gone in an instant.  
“What kids?” Phil ground out.  
“The ones Strex drug off to that camp of theirs.” The stranger bit his lip. “Our children. Has anyone been sent to them? Or are they still, are they still locked up in Desert Bluffs?”  
A sigh came from Phil’s teenage escort. “The camp. Right. I’ll bring it up to Tamika when I check in.” Maureen winced. “We’ll get it sorted out. Promise.”

“Thanks.” The smile on their host’s scarred face was unsettlingly wan. “I mean it. For everything.”

The door closed.  
Phil let out a breath of pure relief. “Looks like we’re down to cleaning up,” he murmured.

“Cleaning up?”  
“The hardest part,” Phil answered her unspoken question. “The part with all the big decisions. What do we do with Desert Bluffs? What do we do with that camp? With the children in it? What about the Strex employees left here in Night Vale?”

Maureen’s eyes were blank when she looked back at him. “Beams above am I glad that’s not all my responsibility,” she said after several awkward seconds had passed. “At least there’s nothing all that urgent about the camp, or Desert Bluffs in general. Either that flash of light killed them or it didn’t. We can afford to wait for Tamika’s orders.”

Phil smiled thinly. “I suppose we can.”

**Author's Note:**

> Updates should come roughly every two weeks ^_^  
Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are always appreciated. <3


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